The Reigate Rituals
by frozen-delight
Summary: "What is it about you that people start going on a manic killing spree whenever you're near?" In which Sherlock battles sickness, cows, a case and John's new girl-friend Mary – not precisely in that order.
1. Chapter 1

So, I've finally decided to start publishing my second Sherlock fic. It takes place a couple of months after the events of "The Adventure of the Norwood Consultants", but can be read as a stand-alone.

I'm not going to make any promises of weekly updates, because I'm really busy with coursework, though as Season 3 is also somewhat delayed, I'm pretty sure I'll finish this before the new episodes grace our TV screens.

This first chapter is actually a kind of prologue and consists of quite a lot of rambling, sorry. I was a bit angry by some of the series 3 spoilers and comments and that shows, I fear. What fascinated me so much about "Sherlock" was the depiction of unconventional relationships: People could be a family without being blood relatives, people could be a couple without sleeping with each other. So my anger at this whole wedding business isn't the disappointment of having fantasised sexually about two characters. Marrying means making a conscious decision to spend the rest of your life with the person that is most important to you. But the whole of season 2 seemed to be devoted to John's dawning realisation that his friendship with Sherlock was the most meaningful relationship in his life. And I don't see how John's wedding wouldn't disrupt that. I hope that Season 3 manages to clear up all my doubts, but at present I can't help but feel angry and disappointed.

Due to this, there's not going to be a wedding in this fic and the focus will be on integrating Mary into John's live without disrupting his friendship with Sherlock.

Sorry for the longest preface ever, please enjoy, please review!

Disclaimer: Obviously, I don't own "Sherlock". Credit for nearly everything goes to Moffat, Gatiss and Conan Doyle.

**Chapter 1**

'What part exactly about being sick and in need of bedrest is your brilliant mind unable to process?'

Arms akimbo and trying for his sternest Captain Watson Glare, John planted himself in front of the consulting detective, who tried to emerge from his bedroom.

'Insults, doctor, really? Your bedside manner is appalling,' Sherlock sneered between coughs.

'Technically, this doesn't count as bedside manner since you're not actually in bed. Now go back to bed. You need to sleep!' John said, his jaw set in unrelenting determination, and steered his friend back to his bed.

'But I can't sleep!' Sherlock wailed. 'And the bed's not helping!'

'Then try to! Need I remind you that I travelled all the way to bloody Germany to fetch you. Least you can do now is to make a bloody effort. Count sheep.'

'That's never helped anybody.'

'Go through the periodic table.'

'Takes me less than a minute to do so.'

'Maybe it'll be enough if you just stop talking and close your eyes.'

'I might sleep better on the sofa!'

'No, Sherlock, you're ill, you have about the iron value of a frozen 400-year old corpse, you need a proper bed.'

'That's both over-dramatic and scientifically inaccurate. And I don't want to be in bed.'

'I'll strap you to it if I have to!'

'Then I'll tell Mary that you've been using me to satisfy your sadomasochistic kinks!'

'She'd be thrilled to learn that I do actually have some interesting kinks,' John quipped back, smirking.

'Oh, go away. I hate you.'

With this, Sherlock turned his head to the side and pouted silently. If he hadn't been so alarmingly pale and so annoyingly stubborn, it might have been nothing short of adorable.

'Very mature,' John retorted drily. 'Now go to sleep, like a good boy.'

'I'll sooner die of boredom than fall asleep. If I die, I'll come back to haunt you forever,' Sherlock promised, trying to make his voice sound sinister rather than just flat and hoarse, and promptly coughed again under the strain.

'Too bad you don't believe in ghosts. You'd make a very poor one.'

Sherlock didn't reply. He blinked and swallowed forcefully. A moment later tears started rolling down his face.

Perplexed, John stared at his pale friend. He had been joking. Maybe Sherlock had taken him seriously. After all, he was exhausted from not having slept for days on end, his blood levels were atrociously bad and on top of all that he currently suffered from a bad temper. But surely there had been nothing in John's word to be grievously injuring, nothing that warranted actual tears.

The answer to this riddle presented itself in a high-pitched shriek from the doorway: 'John, what have you done to him?'

Throwing a practically filthy glare at her boyfriend, Mary hastened to Sherlock's side. She threw her arms protectively around him and placed a soothing kiss on the top of his head.

'Oh, you poor boy, has John been nasty to you? I'm so sorry. I'll take care of you now. Come, come, it's going to be alright. I'll get you something to drink, alright? Calm down, dear!'

As she passed by her boyfriend to fetch a glass of water, she hissed: 'Oh John, how could you!'

John shrank a little in his chair under her furious glare. He really didn't think that he had earned it.

Looking back at his sick friend in the bed, he began: 'I didn't mean to upset –'

But the grin on Sherlock's white face made him halt.

The bastard was grinning, while tears were still rolling down his face. The bastard! Obviously, unlike John, he had heard Mary enter the flat, and had decided to manipulate her to take his side against the nagging doctor. The bastardy bastard!

When Mary re-entered, the grin immediately vanished from Sherlock's pale face. Dolefully, he accepted the water that she was offering him.

Mary smiled at him and petted his hair.

'There, there, stop crying, darling. I won't let John be nasty to you anymore.'

For a second, Sherlock smirked in obvious self-satisfaction. John felt like strangling him. But then Sherlock suddenly stiffened, put down the glass of water and looked up at Mary in horror.

'What – what is that?'

Mary's smile deepened.

'What did you put in that water?' he insisted.

'Relax, relax, just something to help you sleep. Just let go.'

'You – you –,' Sherlock began, but his voice gradually grew weaker and his head slumped back onto the pillow. After a couple of seconds, he stopped fighting the effect of the drugs. His breaths evened out and soon he was sound asleep.

'You can't give him sleeping pills just like that!' John protested as soon as he had got over his first amazement.

'Shut up, dear. He desperately wanted and needed to sleep. He's been awake for what – five days? And he simply couldn't fall asleep. I sometimes have that after particularly long, late-night negotiations. Sleeping pills can help. And he would never have taken them if you'd have offered. I was doing him a favour. And you, too. You weren't very successful in putting him to bed.'

'While I'm going to maintain the opinion that it's not particularly ethical to drug patients without their consent, I must agree with you on one thing.'

'Really? What's that?' Mary asked and resumed stroking Sherlock's hair.

'You were right: I'm not sure I actually want children.'

Mary grinned, patted Sherlock's curls one last time and raised herself from his bed.

'Let's have tea, shall we? I brought some takeaway with me.'

John followed her into the kitchen, humming happily, and thought for the hundredth or so time that his relationship with Mary was too good to be true.

_-SHSHSH-_

The thing was, John would never have imagined himself with someone like Mary. He had only asked her out because well, that was what he did. He never came across a pretty woman that he didn't ask to go out with him.

To be honest, he hadn't thought they would survive more than one or two dates and maybe a bit of kissing and shagging. To him, they seemed absolutely incompatible.

She was a successful broker at a Swiss investment company, alternately harsh and charming, everything that successful business women inevitably needed to be. There was nothing kind, patient or even demure about her. In fact, none of the traits that he would have identified as typically female or would have thought most necessary to conduct a relationship applied to her.

Dating her was a constant challenge. And yet – after two months they were still dating, with no end in sight. His relationship with her was his greatest success in the department so far.

Mary was the first in his long string of girlfriends who didn't feel threatened by his lifestyle and his friendship with Sherlock. She had accompanied the consulting detective and his blogger when they'd solved the case she had consulted them about. She also read John's blog. Nothing about their dangerous work and their sometimes even more hazardous domesticity at the flat managed to surprise or worse to repel her.

Yet saying that she tolerated Sherlock or that she viewed their close friendship with patience and understanding would have been wrong. Understanding, patience, tolerance weren't part of her nature.

Unbelievable as it might be, she honestly seemed fond of Sherlock. So fond, in fact, that she had made a point of always asking Sherlock to accompany them whenever John had asked her out. With the result that John had at first thought that she had fallen in love with his friend and was trying to date him.

But then there had been the memorable day when Sherlock hadn't been with them and hot kissing ensued and then shortly afterwards another memorable occasion with even hotter proceedings and that had been quite enough to persuade John that he was Mary's object after all.

Provided that she had any object at all. Sometimes, he really wasn't sure.

All her life she had worked and fought hard for the position she currently occupied. It was her treasure, her darling, her everything, and any relationship had to come second. Unlike his previous girlfriends, she wasn't always nagging at him to make more time for her. And she cancelled their dates just as frequently as he did.

At the beginning of their relationship, she had casually listed her major shortcomings, 'My faults, darling? Well, I don't really have a thing for pets, I regularly kill my plants and like most women I'm pretty bitchy where other women are concerned. And I get my kicks from risking other people's money. Anything else you'd like to know?'

John wished she had given him a fair warning that she often forgot to call and that her appointment book was always blaringly full.

On the one hand, this was a relief. Less pressure, fewer expectations that he was bound to fail. On the other hand, it made him feel unappreciated and unimportant. It was an uncomfortable feeling. He was a man and as a man he naturally wanted to be admired and sought-after by his girlfriend.

This prompted John to invest more than he had into his other relationships. Sometimes he would call, if Mary forgot it yet again. And she was the first one he had real relationship talks with. Not Tell-me-what-I need-to-do-so-that-you-stop-complaining-and-contin ue-to-sleep-with-me-talks, but actual talks.

Regularly, these talks escalated into shouting matches. Like Sherlock, Mary had a knack for throwing horribly insightful things at his head, particularly when it came to his family plans and his view of women in general.

Like most successful business women, Mary was pretty sure that she didn't want to have children. Matrimony didn't rank much higher on her wish list.

'We no longer live in the 19th century. I can have sex whenever I want; I hardly need to get married for that. I'm financially independent and I can rig up a shelf by myself. So what's the point?'

'You watch all those period dramas that are all about women finding the partner for life and getting married. You must dream of it, too,' John tried to reason with her.

'Sometimes, yes. But precisely because I can always watch those films, I don't necessarily need that to actually happen in my own life.'

And then she added, 'You don't really want to start a family, either. You'd be a great father, I'm sure, but are you even willing to commit yourself not to one but to several meaningful relationships for the rest of your life when so far you fail to have more than one?'

'What do you mean – more than one? Of course I'm exclusively dating you!'

'Don't be stupid, John, I was talking about Sherlock, of course. He's the only one you're really close to. I know you always mock him for his poor social skills – but he's got more true friends than you!'

'What? I've got lots of friends! Just the other day, Colonel Hayter from my regiment in Afghanistan emailed me. Invited me to stay with him and said I could bring Sherlock along, too, if I wanted to. Sherlock's former … _acquaintances_ only contact him when they've got a problem for him to solve.'

'_Colonel Hayter?_ You're not even using his first name. And you like to be on first name terms with everybody. Let me guess, that was the first time that he got in touch since your return to London. Great friendship, that.'

'I went for a pint with my army mate Bill Murray just a fortnight ago. Sherlock never goes to the pub.'

'Christ, this isn't a competition, John. You're far better than Sherlock at making friends, to be sure, but you're crap when it comes to maintaining them. You're the man everybody likes and trusts immediately. But you're also the man that everybody forgets as soon as you're out of their sight. You're simply too reserved. You laugh and you joke, you're easy-going and fun to be with, but at the end of the day, your counterpart knows nothing about you.'

John sighed and wearily ran his hand through his hair.

'Mary – I never said I was easy to be with…'

'Shut up!' she interrupted brusquely. 'Don't be so dramatic! I'm saying some pretty harsh things to you, all right, but I never said I didn't want to be with you. I'm not easy to be with, either. My past boyfriends called me arrogant, callous, career-obsessed, commitment-phobic, neurotic… Actually, those are still the nicest things they said… My best and longest-lasting relationship is with my job, damn. You might be trying, at times, but I'm a nightmare and I know that, so I'm not really blaming you. All I'm saying is: You don't have any close friends from school or uni or the army, beyond the occasional short message on your blog and a quick pint when they're in town. You're not estranged from your family, either, but you rarely contact them. Obviously, you don't really feel the need. So stop whining about how you want a family when it doesn't really matter to you.'

John had needed a long walk outside to calm himself before he managed to stop whining and to admit that Mary did have a point.

When they met next, Mary seemed to have forgotten their previous conversation. There was little talking and a lot of touching. Afterwards they lay next to each other in bed and Mary nestled her head in John's shoulder, humming contently. It was nice, better than nice, bewilderingly so.

Remembering what she had said, he asked her, indicating between the two of them, 'But what's all this, then?'

'This is you and me, simple as that. We don't have long-term hopes and plans in the relationship department, so no pressure there. Right? We're just going to see where it takes us. So far it's been great, hasn't it?'

'Yeah,' John admitted grudgingly, not really convinced.

'Listen, darling,' Mary added, in a much gentler voice, and slowly stroked his cheek, 'you're immature, I'm immature, but who says that our relationship has to be? I really like you, John.'

John really wished that they had left on the light, so he might have seen her face and found the answer to all his questions.

_-SHSHSH-_

Putting Sherlock to bed was a nightmare and made John sympathise with all sleep-deprived and dishevelled newly-minted parents. Unlike toddlers who refused to be left alone because they were afraid of the dark or begrudged their parents a couple of hours that weren't centred about themselves, Sherlock was actually trying to sleep.

But the more he wanted to, the less he could. Knowing his friend's history with addiction, John was unwilling to prescribe him sleeping meds on a regular basis. Herbal medicinal products, however, did nothing to keep Sherlock's insomnia at bay.

Sherlock proposed more drastic measures, but John wouldn't consent to his friend's blunt orders of simply knocking him out.

'I'm not damaging your precious head,' he said, shaking his head at the cricket bat that his friend had suddenly procured from the depths of his wardrobe.

'One good hit is hardly going to do it any more damage than all this resting in bed. I can virtually hear my brain cells rot,' Sherlock muttered, but John wasn't convinced.

Instead he proposed reading to his friend. Sherlock's latest print purchase turned out to be a detailed description and analysis of poisonous plants in the Middle-East. John never found out whether this method would have been successful in putting his friend to sleep because he was so bored by the topic that he soon drifted off himself.

When he awoke an hour later, he found his friend wide awake, but gazing at him with about as fondness as an insomniac could possibly muster.

In the end, there was nothing to be done for Sherlock's insomnia, but everything to be done to prevent too much boredom, so that he would rest at least, even if he never slept for more than one or two hours.

Molly took to dropping by after work, bringing along gruesome pictures of dead bodies. Together, the pair of them analysed injuries and debated over causes of death.

Sherlock was convinced that this aided his recovery far more than the pills of dietary supplements that John forced him to take. John thought otherwise, but was glad for every minute that the consulting four-year-old spent in his bed without complaining.

'Thanks, Molly, I really owe you one,' he said every time she came to visit and made a point of always asking her about Toby to show at least some of his gratitude.

He also got the impression that even his over-critical girlfriend warmed towards the pathologist somewhat, because she never interrupted Molly when she was blabbing on about what Mary privately thought 'a horribly fat and spoilt, fluffy little demon'.

_-SHSHSH-_

Their double date with Lestrade and Molly turned out to be a disaster.

It had been Mary's idea. She wanted to meet all John's friends and also introduced him to her own.

While John and her best friend Melissa got on like a house on fire, he was convinced more firmly than ever that all bankers were bastards after a dinner with her colleagues. On the other hand, Mary managed to charm both Mike Stamford and Bill Murray when they watched a Champion's League match together at their local pub.

But having drinks with Lestrade and Molly was much less of a success. Mainly because Mary and Molly didn't really get on.

Molly was obviously intimidated by the investment banker's harshness. Although Mary never said anything halfway as rude or hurtful as the comments that regularly came out of Sherlock's mouth when he was in the morgue, Molly felt a lot more uncomfortable than she ever did around the consulting detective.

It hadn't exactly been a pleasure to be informed by Sherlock that the blouse she had chosen was rather unflattering, 'Are you meeting with Lestrade tonight? I really hope you're going to make a stop at home and change beforehand. In that blouse you look as if you'd gained three pounds in the last week.'

But Sherlock had meant well, even if he hadn't phrased it particularly tactfully. Whereas there was no hint of well-meaning in Mary's frozen face when Molly made one of her ill-timed jokes about cadavers.

Mary herself, coming back home, made no secret of her dislike of the pathologist.

'She really gets on my nerves, that one! She's just so – so… I mean, I get that she's brainy and really good at her job, or else Sherlock wouldn't always work with her, but why does she have to be so _nerdy_, so _ridiculous_? She could really make a lot more of herself. That dress was a fashion disaster of the highest order. Whichever shop assistant told her that it looks oh-so-sweet on her ought to be hanged! And then those ridiculous earrings which completely undid whatever effect the dress was supposed to have in the first place. God! She looked like mummy's good little girl going to her first school disco night. And then she laughs and blushes and stammers and makes those ridiculous jokes that embarrass everybody else. Apart from Greg, maybe. She's socially even more awkward than your darling flatmate! I was looking at her and constantly thought, "Get a grip, girl, get a damn grip!" – Please don't look at me like that, John. Was I too bitchy? I did tell you I was bitchy, didn't I?'

'Well, I was quite unprepared for that amount of bitchiness.'

'In that case, I apologise, love,' she said with a flirtatious wink, 'There is simply no limit to my bitchiness.'

John grinned.

'I'd like to test out the limits of your bitchiness.'

'Oh do. But at least admit that I was right, even if I was being rather nasty about it.'

'Right that Molly Hooper's outfit was terrible?'

'Yes and more. I mean, she has an amazingly nice figure, much nicer than mine, in fact, and yet you've never asked her out. And you generally ask out anything half-way pretty that comes along in a skirt.'

'Are you saying I'm a very wicked skirt-chaser? Or are you insulted that I only asked you out because you're a pretty thing in a skirt?' John asked teasingly.

'Neither, love. Without your wickedness we wouldn't be here right now. And I'm going to make sure that you don't do any further skirt chasing in the near future.'

'Too bad. How do you intend to do that?'

'Why don't we move this conversation to the bedroom so that I can explain it to you _in detail_?'

'Well, considering that I'm just a dense old man, you'll have to be very, very thorough in all your explanations,' John grinned slyly.

'You really are a very wicked man, Doctor Watson,' Mary purred, slowly raising herself from the sofa and reaching out her hand.

'And you are delightfully bitchy, my love,' John re-joined with a wink, taking her hand and following her to the bedroom.

_-SHSHSH-_

Unlike the ever-loyal Molly, Mycroft refrained from visiting his bedridden little brother, which was a relief, stating that he was too busy with a top-secret operation.

'Probably just the prime minister's next press-conference,' Sherlock sneered and immediately winced, because his sore throat seemed intent on punishing him for all his little jibes.

Grimly pressing his mouth shut, he proceeded to bin the Get Well!-card and the crosswords that his brother had sent. John fished the latter back out of the bin and tried to keep himself entertained with puzzling them out while sitting vigil at his friend's bedside.

Sherlock took pleasure in telling his flatmate some of the answers, unbidden, of course. John was reasonably certain that it was impossible for his friend to read the clues, what with his head all buried in his pillows, and it constantly amazed him that Sherlock could tell just from his facial expression what he was racking his brains about.

Meanwhile John liked to tease his friend with clues on popular culture and common knowledge that were perfectly clear to him, but baffled the sick genius.

Overall, both of them enjoyed themselves immensely and neither regretted that the crosswords hadn't ended their lives in the waste paper bin.

If this had been the original intention behind Mycroft's gift, they were truly putting it to good use.

_-SHSHSH-_

Ultimately it didn't matter whether Mary and Molly would ever become BFFs, but getting on well with Sherlock was undeniably the key to a successful relationship between the pair of them.

The one time that John actually broached the subject of Sherlock, it resulted in strikingly hot sex, of all things.

'Doesn't it bother you?' John asked Mary when they were sitting on the sofa in her flat after a visit to the cinema.

It had been their fourth date and Mary still hadn't made any complaints about his close friendship with his flatmate. Neither had she suggested that he ought to move out of 221B nor had she asked him why he was dating her when he was being such a brilliant boyfriend to Sherlock.

'What? That you're madly in love with your best friend? No.'

John didn't know whether "madly in love" was an apt description for how he felt about Sherlock, but instead of spluttering, stammering or denying it all, he settled for: 'I'm not gay. You know I'm not.'

'I do know, yes,' Mary smirked.

'But he's amazing and brilliant and wonderful. Objectively and subjectively.'

'Objectively and subjectively, that's sweet!'

'Stop teasing me! I'm not gay. But I'm aware that he's attractive, too.'

'Sure. So what? So you've been having certain thoughts? Well, of course. We live in an over-sexualised society. Inanimate objects already make us think of sex, so I'd really be worried that you're in complete denial if you'd never been thinking about it when presented with such a lovely arse. I've been thinking about it, too, come to think of it, when I saw him wear that purple shirt of sex for the first time.'

John gaped at her.

'The _what_?'

'The sexy purple shirt that he always wears when he wants to manipulate you into doing something, haven't you noticed?'

'Haven't _you_ noticed that Sherlock Holmes is being a manipulative bastard no matter what his shirt colour is? Hang on – what are we talking about? That you think that I'd rather sleep with my best friend than with you or that you actually want to sleep with him?'

Mary laughed.

'Neither, darling. You're endlessly fascinated by him and I can see why, that's all. But who cares? Thoughts are nothing. He certainly doesn't want to and you're not sure if you really want to. What actually matters is that both you and I have been having certain much more decided thoughts about each other that we're amazingly keen to put into action.'

John blushed and grinned, visualising all the exciting things they hadn't done yet.

'Amazingly keen?'

'Yeah,' Mary grinned back, a predatory flash in her eyes. 'Now be a dear and shut up about your darling flatmate and kiss me. Objectively and subjectively, please.'

And that had been the end of that discussion.

But the lack of arguments about Sherlock didn't mean that they didn't argue at all. Belligerent and bossy by nature, Mary always found topics to rant and rave at him. She never avoided a quarrel that might be had and never let him off easy.

On some level, John was secretly enjoying her brutal honesty, as much as it bewildered him. Probably it was his slumbering soldier persona which refused to be content in long periods of calm and peacefulness.

'You don't want dinner, you just want sex. Why don't you just say so?' Mary accused him one day.

'Didn't seem very polite,' John replied huskily, having almost choked on his wine.

'To hell with polite. I'm supposed to be your girlfriend.'

'And as your boyfriend I'm supposed to be nice to you, not just use you for sex.'

'Is that what you think – that you're using me for sex! Christ! You've been reading too much Harry Potter!'

This time John really choked on his wine.

'What's Harry Potter got to do with anything?' he coughed hoarsely.

'You think that girls are giggly, irrational fantasy creatures that boys can't possibly understand. We are human, too, you know, despite slight differences in anatomy. We're not some species in the zoo that won't bite if you follow a certain set of instructions. I can't believe I'm actually explaining this to you! You think that if you do certain things, than we incomprehensible female creatures will just stop complaining and spread our legs. It doesn't work like that! I don't expect weekly invitations to dinner or the cinema. What I'm asking for is the original intention behind such courtesy: trust, honesty and respect.'

'You think I don't respect you.'

'I think you don't really respect women in general,' Mary fired back. 'But I'm hoping to make you respect _me_, at least. Don't think of me as your girlfriend, think of me as your friend.'

'What does that mean?'

'It means that on a fundamental level: I _am_ you. Treat me like yourself: Just because I have more wobbly bits up here and less wobbly bits between my legs, I don't expect to be in smooth water all my days, captain.'

John still wasn't sure what she meant, exactly, but when he heard that quote again, later, curled up next to her on the sofa, watching one of her favourite period dramas, he decided to give it some more serious consideration.

He began to realise that Mary wasn't just watching those films for the sake of their romantic happy-ends. Maybe she was trying to tell him something through the TV screen. And for the first time, he didn't fall asleep half-way through, but actually followed the series with interest.

Another time, Mary made him watch _Emma_. He liked it better than all the other classic film adaptions that she had introduced him to so far.

Jonny Lee Miller looked rather dashing and said many amusingly clever things, though he had the intolerable habit of constantly leaving the doors open, even in freezing winter. Mrs Hudson would have long thrown him out of the flat if John had ever attempted something similar.

That being said, it was rather fascinating to watch Miller and Romola Garai both playing detectives in their neighbourhood, observing everyday life around them and trying to deduce all their neighbours' intimate little secrets. It reminded him of his detecting friend and briefly made him wonder whether a modern-day Emma would keep a blog with regular updates on who was probably in love with whom.

Then Miller casually remarked, 'How we are all drawn to Hartfield like magnets and cannot leave,' and John suddenly asked himself if Mary was really trying to tell him something.

_-SHSHSH-_

'You're a lousy doctor,' Sherlock complained. 'My throat's sore and you've done nothing to help.'

'If you just stopped talking and took your medicine, it would work wonders,' John replied, gritting his teeth with the effort to remain calm and patient.

He understood that Sherlock was fed up with being cooped up in bed. But why did illness and bedrest have to turn him into a bloody four-year-old?

'Boring. Aren't you supposed to see to my psychological needs, too, doctor?'

'If you continue like this, you soon won't have any psychological needs left that need to be seen to, because I'll have strangled you first,' John promised in a dark voice.

'Making threats in front of a policeman? Really, John?' came his friend's disparaging reply, followed by a series of dry coughs.

John turned around to find Lestrade standing in the doorway.

'I wanted to see how you two were doing after all those sinister texts that I received today,' he announced with a grin and brandished his phone.

On the screen that the detective inspector held out to him, John made out several text messages by Sherlock which had been sent during the last hour:

_Crime in progress, please interfere. SH_

_Am being held captive at the flat. SH_

_ Culprit is a sadistic ex-army doctor. SH_

_ Arrest immediately. SH_

_ This is torture. SH_

_ In case you don't know this: It is your job to protect and rescue innocent citizens. SH_

_ Are you refusing to do your job? SH_

_ Don't send Anderson or Donovan, by the way. I refuse to be rescued by completely incompetent morons. SH_

John chuckled, despite himself.

'Unless you've brought us a case file, there's really going to be a crime at this flat in the next 24 hours. And considering that this pasty-faced weed here presently has the strength of a chicken, the homicidal maniac is probably going to be me.'

'Pasty-faced weed?' Sherlock repeated in scandalised tones and tossed his pillow at John's head.

Lestrade, ready to save the day or at least the temporary peace at 221B, had wisely brought a case file with him and produced it before a fully-fledged pillow fight was under way.

However, after quickly scanning through it, Sherlock claimed that it was boring.

'It was the brother. Didn't you notice his fingernails?'

Luckily, Lestrade was also working on a more complex problem. There had been a break-in at an expensive jewellery store: no signs of forced entry, no activation of the perfectly functioning alarm system, no one knew how the thieves had done it.

Break-ins weren't Lestrade's division, but he was filling in for his personal rival at NSY, Gregson, so he was grimly determined to solve this before Gregson returned from his holidays. They agreed that John could accompany the detective inspector to the crime scene and share it with the consulting detective via Skype.

'Only on one condition, though,' John insisted. 'You're going to take your medicine without complaining and when Mrs Hudson stays with you tomorrow, you're going to be nice to her. Deal?'

'I don't need a babysitter.'

'I'm not even going to grace that with an answer. Do we have a deal?'

Sherlock shut his eyes dramatically as though John was driving a particularly hard bargain and everything in him screamed to decline. Eventually, he came to the conclusion that this was probably the best that life had to offer him at present and after heaving the sigh of the long-suffering, he said petulantly, 'Deal.'

_-SHSHSH-_

Even more surprising than Mary's apparent fondness for Sherlock was the consulting detective's tolerance of John's latest girlfriend.

Believe it or not, Sherlock did nothing to threaten his burgeoning relationship. On the contrary, he seemed to promote it to a certain extent.

He still made John cancel his dates when they had a case and often ignored Mary, but he refrained from being outright rude and once even saved the day. The day being Valentine's Day.

John and Mary had only been out for drinks twice and hadn't even had dinner with each other so far. John had booked a table at Angelo's, only to be informed by his infuriating flatmate in the afternoon of the fateful day that Mary didn't like Italian.

'She hinted at it five times when I was present and probably some more when I wasn't – aren't you ever listening?' he jibed and added some kind of powder to the petri dish in front of him, causing the contents to light up in flaringly bright green.

John thought back to his past conversations with Mary. He couldn't recall any obvious hints on the subject, until he suddenly vaguely recalled some story about food poisoning in Rome – shit!

He phoned all the non-Italian restaurants that he knew of, but all of them were booked out, of course, it being Valentine's Day. In this hour of despair, Sherlock offered his help and called in a favour at a Provençal place, good, tasty food, but not too posh, perfect for John.

John promised to do him a favour in return, hoping that it wouldn't involve eyeballs.

But Sherlock merely requested that his friend accompany him to the opera. Mary thought it was sweet. John didn't know what to think.

A fortnight later, Sherlock took him to see _Don Carlos_ at the Royal Opera House. It was unlike all the operas that John knew.

Normally, there were a Soprano and a Tenor who were tenderly-desperately in love with each other. Unfortunately, an evil Bass always appeared and tried to end their bliss, resulting in many beautiful arias and at least three corpses by the end of the evening.

However, in this case, there was no simple love triangle. Instead, the Tenor hero entertained a homoerotic friendship with an eloquent Baritone while at the same time loving and pining for a Soprano, who had been his fiancée but now was his stepmother and therefore unattainable. Both relationships held the same importance. And when one was doomed, the other was, too. The friend being dead, the hero also gave up his love for the stepmother.

John didn't know what to make of it. First Mary and her period dramas, then Sherlock and his opera. Suddenly, everyone seemed intent on giving him hints.

Obviously there was something going on. Something that both Sherlock and Mary were perfectly aware of. Whereas John, whom it primarily concerned, had no fucking clue what it was, thank you very much.

Fortunately, he wasn't prone to brooding and fretting. If his relationship with Mary was doomed, so be it. He decided to enjoy it as long as it lasted.

_-SHSHSH-_

Hypoferremia and bedrest didn't stop Sherlock from getting up to all kinds of mischief.

Instead of telling John that he had already solved the break-in case, he made him do all kinds of silly things under the pretext that they were somehow related to it. For instance, he induced him to stop passengers in front of the jewellery shop and to pose ridiculous questions which vaguely reminded John of truth-or-dare-games at high school.

After priding himself on being useful, he came home to find that he had only been making a fool of himself like all those unwitting people on Candid Camera. Needless to say, he was less than happy with this discovery.

There were tears of laughter in Sherlock's eyes and his cheeks were flushed bright red with amusement. If John hadn't been so angry at him, he might have been pleased with how much better his friend looked.

'I can't believe you actually asked the little old lady about the diet of her cocker spaniel,' Sherlock giggled. 'Did you really think the dog's eating habits were the key to the mystery?'

'So happy to have amused you! Next time you need a laugh, just tell me, so that I can put on a clown's costume first!' John shouted and furiously stormed away.

'Is he really angry?' Sherlock quietly asked Mrs Hudson, who was still sitting next to his bed, knitting a scarf.

'Don't worry, dear, he'll come round,' his landlady reassured him. 'Maybe just don't do it again.'

After counting her rows, she added in a whisper, 'Though it really was very funny, wasn't it, when he asked that vicar for his nail scissors?'

And both of them burst out laughing once more.

_-SHSHSH-_

Gradually, despite Mary's independence and John's ignorance, they found a good routine for their relationship.

Mary rarely left the office before nine p.m. She truly was a workaholic, addicted to the adrenaline rush of having to react quickly and take wild risks when strange little incidents like the change in holiday plans of a leading European politician overthrew all her careful calculations on how the financial market would develop.

Often she was too exhausted to make great plans for the evening and cancelled her dates with John.

As a compromise, John suggested that they didn't actually have to do anything, but that she could just come to their flat after work, when there was no case, so that they would at least get to see each other regularly. To her own surprise, Mary liked these quiet nights in better than anything she could have imagined.

Soon she became a fixture at Baker Street, sitting on the sofa, solving sudokus, with her feet in John's lap. Meanwhile, the doctor would read the latest edition of the medical journal he had subscribed to in order to keep his medical knowledge up-to-date. He wanted to be a useful assistant to Sherlock, after all.

And as for the consulting detective, he would occupy himself with all kinds of bizarre little experiments. Occasionally, he would start talking to John, without actually requiring any kind of reply, or, on a slightly more regular basis, something would explode. But overall, it was very quiet, very uneventful, very domestic.

Sherlock's eight-week-absence put a stop to these perfectly domestic little evenings.

Mycroft had approached his little brother when one of his MI6 people, Nancy Smith, had been discovered dead.

John was a bit surprised that his friend took the offered case. Then again, he wasn't. After all, Sherlock liked to pretend that he was in his brother's debt for his involvement in the public's 180-degrees turn in their attitude to the world's only consulting detective.

A threatening message from the man who ran the British Government had induced Kitty Riley to write a thrilling exposé on how brilliantly the super sleuth had freed the world from a dangerous criminal web and the rest of the press had followed suite.

Brazen careerist that she was, Kitty Riley never actually revoked her previous accusations and admitted that she'd been wrong. She merely published her hymns of praise with the same triumphant flourish as her prior damnations, as if she were perfectly ignorant of their clashing contradictions.

Never mind how much it repelled him, John grudgingly admired her method. It was awful, but it had style.

Anyway, no matter how willingly or how convincingly, the press had turned yet again and it was a relief. There were no longer jeering throngs of reporters assaulting them at their every step, and for that the new-old beloved detective amateur duo was deeply grateful.

However, Sherlock hated feeling even the slightest traces of gratitude towards his elder brother, so he consented to solve the mystery of Nancy Smith's death without much ado.

He took one look at the mutilated body of the MI6 agent and declared that she wasn't a British citizen, no matter what all databases might claim. Instead, he made the educated guess that she was German and had only acquired a new British identity with the help of the late consulting criminal.

When pressed for proof, he explained that a British woman would never have worn a tank top without having shaved her armpits, even if she had no plans of going out, whereas some continental women were a lot more lax about shaving.

In consequence, Sherlock spent almost two months on the continent, tracing Ms Smith back to a criminal gang that operated all through Europe. They infiltrated local secret services, police organisations and administrations, all with the purpose of distracting these organs from their major criminal operations.

Nancy Smith was thought to have accidently betrayed their latest project, weapon smuggling with the nice code name "Baron Maupertuis", accordingly she had been eliminated.

The fate of Nancy Smith neither moved nor interested the consulting detective, whereas the discovery of a major criminal organisation in Central Europe that nobody had been aware of before provided ample sources of fascination. With cunning and endurance, Sherlock managed to put a stop to the gang's game and handed them over to the respective local authorities.

Meanwhile, Baker Street felt lonely without him. It was almost like it had been when John had believed him to be dead. So John preferred to pick Mary up after work and to accompany her to her place.

Being at Mary's somehow always meant sex or watching BBC period dramas rather than just sitting together, but this was nice, too, in its own way.

With his own flat glaringly empty, John took to spending the nights, too, curled up next to his girlfriend. Her warm skin, her steady heart-beat, her soft breaths all provided great comfort when his sleepy mind, unbidden, once more conjured up the image of a life without his best friend.

He had made Sherlock promise to text him once every day and curiously enough, despite all distractions and the intense focus that the case provided, the consulting detective actually kept his promise. Yet sometimes the texts weren't enough. And then John dreaded that this time, his friend really wouldn't come back.

In these moments, Mary always gave him a reassuring squeeze.

'He'll be fine. You really ought to give him more credit. He can take care of himself. Probably he's working for days on end, forgetting to eat and to sleep, so that you'll have something to fret about when he comes back, but he'll survive.'

One time, she added in a low voice, 'I miss him, too, you know.'

And then John wondered if maybe this no-strings-attached investment broker, who found it so much easier to be scathing rather than tender, this strangely unfeminine woman, whom he was dating without really knowing why… - if maybe, maybe, maybe she was a rather wonderful person, after all.

_-SHSHSH-_

Of course John came round. He always did, didn't he. But Sherlock didn't stop being a truly infuriating patient and John didn't stop having a quick-flaring temper, so they were in for many more arguments.

After one of his daily fights with Sherlock that no, he wasn't nearly recovered yet, he definitely still needed to stay in bed and take his pills for several more days, which his friend, sick and bored, never conceded to, John angrily stormed out of his patient's bedroom once more, slamming the door shut.

In the kitchen, John found Mrs Hudson and Mary preparing dinner, merrily chatting away. Apparently, Mrs Hudson was one of the few members of her own sex that Mary really liked and admired.

Ever since she had seen how the sprightly landlady had knocked out that awful Bart Sholto with her frying pan at the dramatic finale of the case Mary had consulted Sherlock and John about, she had learnt not to be deceived by Mrs Hudson's harmless-little-old-lady-attitude.

Mrs Hudson was happily nattering away on the newest developments with her beau, the bakery owner, while she chopped up a huge pile of carrots. Meanwhile, Mary was peeling potatoes.

It was the most normal, most traditionally female thing John had ever seen her do. He hadn't even known that she could cook at all. It was oddly comforting. In fact, it was so wonderfully normal and unexpected that it made him forget all about his row with Sherlock.

Upon seeing her boyfriend's expression, Mary hastily stated, 'Just this once, darling, because poor Sherlock is sick. Don't get used to it.'

'I wouldn't dream of it,' John grinned.

_-SHSHSH-_

_Case solved. SH_

The morning after this triumphant text arrived, the newspapers all over Europe were full of Sherlock's praise, reporting on his investigations and confirming his prior text message to John.

From that point on, the daily texts ceased.

However, this was no cause for alarm, John decided. After all, his friend might have decided to spend a couple more days on the continent. Either he was doing some sightseeing, not really likely, or, more likely, he was getting in touch with the various informants he had made after his fake suicide.

Maybe he was already bored out of his mind and looking for a new case.

'Maybe he's still not done insulting every single officer of the German police for their abysmal incompetence,' Mary suggested, between giggles, and took a fresh bite of her croissant.

It was Saturday morning and they were having breakfast at Speedy's café. Mary had brought a whole bunch of newspapers. Together, they were browsing the articles on Sherlock's latest case and making up bizarre scenarios during which their absent friend had made the discoveries that were now known to the whole word.

They were trying to outdo each other with fantastical ideas on how the consulting detective had made the connection between the controversial construction of a new central station in Stuttgart and the money laundering in a private restaurant in Northern Italy, when Anthea walked in, eyes firmly fixed on her beloved blackberry.

Approaching them, she said, 'Your car's waiting, John. Remind the driver not to use the M4. They've opened a new construction site there last night.'

'My car? What's this? Is Sherlock alright?' John asked, somewhere between nonplussed and worried.

'Mr Holmes the younger has locked himself in a hotel room in Stuttgart and refuses all contact with the outside world. He appears to be in an irritable temper and a diminished state of health, so Mr Holmes wishes for you to escort him back home. Your car's waiting, John.'

'I can't just –,' John began, but Mary quickly interrupted him, 'Of course you can, darling. Now go, don't miss your flight.'

With a quick peck on his cheek, she pushed him out of the café.

Turning back to Mycroft's assistant, who was typing away on her blackberry, she said with a beaming smile, 'You must be Anthea! Are you ordering someone to be assassinated in North Korea right now? Do you prefer café au lait or latte macchiato?'

In the end, John made his flight in time and managed to bring his friend back home, whereas his girlfriend succeeded in something that he had always failed to do: She managed to buy the inapproachable Anthea a drink and even obtained her mobile phone number.

_-SHSHSH-_

When Sherlock's health seemed to have improved, thanks to John's patience, Mrs Hudson's nourishing meals and tons of dietary supplements, Lestrade asked the consulting detective to accompany him to a crime scene where a particular vicious triple murder had occurred.

The genius detective, not feeling nearly as well as he claimed to be, but bored out of his mind by days of strict bedrest, promptly overworked himself and ruined almost all the progress that had been made.

The elevated temperature, the coughs, the dizzy spells all returned and Sherlock was once more forced to bed by a worried and annoyed Doctor Watson.

As Sherlock was pretty much knocked out when they arrived back at Baker Street, John's wrath directed itself primarily at the Scotland Yard's best detective inspector, who cowered in front of the shorter man like a schoolboy and hastily apologised for his ill-judged action.

However, Lestrade really had no idea just how ill-judged it had been.

Sherlock, as soon as he had halfway recovered his senses, decided to quietly steal out of the flat. He meant to return to the crime scene, as he hadn't been able to solve it immediately, but he didn't even make it there.

Instead, he collapsed on the pavement, less than fifty yards from their doorstep.

Coming back from her customary evening stroll with her bakery owner acquaintance, Mrs Hudson found him lying there.

Right then, John decided that enough was enough and declared, 'I've had my fill, I'm fed right to the gills. This is it – we're going on a holiday!'

Sherlock tried to scoff, but several dry coughs dimmed the effect somewhat.

'Charming idea, John, but I doubt that Mary wants to leave the office at a time when the FTSE-100 is climbing to new heights.'

'I wasn't talking about Mary, I was talking about you.'

Sherlock stared at him with unadulterated horror. The last time he had looked like that, John had been threatening to destroy all his experiments.

As soon as he had recovered his speech, Sherlock protested with all the woeful obstinacy of a four-year-old child, 'I'm not going.'

'Yes, you are.'

'Am not.'

'Oh yes, you are. You need rest. Lots of rest,' John insisted, only to add with a threatening smirk, 'If you don't want to come with me, I'll make sure that _Mycroft_ takes you on a holiday.'

* * *

Next chapter: Finally off to Reigate and to mayhem and murder. Please tell me what you think. All comments are sincerely appreciated.


	2. Chapter 2

So, I'm back with chapter 2, in which the actual case begins and there is a lot of fluffiness that may seem pointless - but actually isn't in most cases, as you'll find out, if you'll be so patient as to continue reading this fic. Also prepare yourself for a fusion with another well-known ACD-story and gratuitious allusions to all kinds of nice books. Please enjoy and tell me what you think!

I'm saying this again and again, because I can see that there are still people out there who are reading my first fanfiction all the way through to the last chapter, but never drop me a line, which means that I don't really know what to think. On the one hand, I tell myself that it can't have bored them completely, as they continued reading, but on the other hand, I can only suppose that they were ultimately disappointed by it. No one is obliged to read my stories and no one who reads them is obliged to comment, of course, but it really helps me as an author when I do get some feedback, even if it consists of all the things that people don't like about my texts - because only that way I can find out what works and what doesn't and how to improve.

That being said, I'm tremendously grateful to all who read the first chapter, reviewed, favourited or followed. A big thank you and much love!

**Chapter 2**

'If there's no signal on my phone, we're leaving and checking into a hotel,' Sherlock said dramatically as he retrieved his phone from his pocket.

'We're in Reigate, not in Middle-earth, of course you'll have a signal,' John tried to reassure him while he finished unpacking their trunks.

'_Middle-what_?' asked His Consulting Highness, who clearly felt too good to lend John a helping hand.

'Oh never mind. What do you need a phone signal for, anyway? No working on cases, we agreed.'

'We agreed no such thing. You blackmailed me into this holiday lark and threatened everybody else not to contact me while we're away. I don't remember getting any say in this,' Sherlock said, pouting.

John sighed.

'Has nobody ever explained this holiday lark to you? It's the opposite of working.'

'Somebody did, once. They told me it was about having fun. I'm not having fun in the stupidly dull countryside'

'Right, let's call this _rehab_ then.'

'Doesn't make it any better. My internet connection is achingly slow. Can't we go into a hotel?'

'What do you need the internet connection for? Your Angry Birds update?' John teased him and stored their now empty trunks under the bed.

'Your attempts at humour are appalling, John. Are you trying to imitate Molly? - I'm in the act of hacking into the local police network. At this speed, I'll be done next Christmas. Why are we staying with Colonel Hayter, anyway, when you don't even like him?'

'You're hacking into the police network? Oh God, one mention of a dead body…' John groaned. 'Please, Sherlock, you're meant to rest. There's no reason to get involved with Christian fanatics.'

'We have no reason to believe that Christian fanatics are involved before we've checked out all the facts of the murder.'

'Sherlock – we left London so you wouldn't go chasing after murderers. You're not up to that right now. You're still recovering your strength. Don't give me that look! You know I'm right. Yes. So please – take it slowly. I'm no sadist, nor a masochist, come to think of it, so I really don't want you to get bored. If your temperature is back to normal tomorrow and if you promise to continue taking your supplements and to relax when I'll tell you to, I'll let you speak to the police. Just take it slowly, okay? No one's consulted us. We don't need to solve this in one night. Now go to bed and sleep, like a good boy.'

'You know I have trouble falling asleep,' Sherlock said, putting down his phone with a growl of frustration.

'Well, try to, at least.'

'Only if you answer my question.'

'What question?'

'Why are we here, John?'

'I told you, you need rest.'

'Not that, John, why are we staying with Colonel Hayter?'

John bit his lip thoughtfully.

'You know… I'm not sure,' he answered eventually, shaking his head with a slightly self-deprecating grin, because it was the truth.

John had been pleased to hear from Colonel Hayter after not having been in contact since his return from Afghanistan. He had forgotten what a horrible braggart Hayter was. In fact, he hadn't thought about him at all.

However, John had never been one to turn down a friendly invitation. Especially in this case, since he felt guilty for not having cared as much about their acquaintance as the good Colonel obviously did. Thus he had been ready enough to accept and Sherlock's poor health had been the tipping point.

Back in Hayter's company, John immediately remembered why he hadn't made any effort to stay in contact with him. His former army mate was loud, coarse and too full of himself to be an attentive host.

He hadn't even taken heed of their embarrassment and faint remonstrances when he had led them into the guestroom with the double bed. Instead, he had blabbed on about the cars that he was currently repairing at the garage, a topic that neither Sherlock nor John held any interest in whatsoever.

In his mail, Hayter had seemed so desirous of renewing their acquaintance and had sentimentally reminisced about the good old army days – but now, face-to-face, John really couldn't detect any of the freely professed friendship and the fond remembrances.

Instead, they were no more and no less than two people who had once known each other, but had nothing in common anymore and had no particular affection for each other to bridge this.

So why had Hayter invited them? What did he want? Was he hoping to snare John back to the poker table and extract another 200 quid from him, ruthless gambler that he was?

Or was he trying to talk John into having his car pimped at a ridiculously high price at the garage where he worked? God, he ought to know that John didn't even have a driver's license, never mind a car.

What else then did he want? John was modest enough to know that Hayter had little more to gain from his visit. So it didn't make sense.

Looking up at Sherlock's inquisitive face, John said slowly, 'It's this thing… when people from your past contact you, people from school, people from uni, you always want to see them. Because all you remember is that you had a past together, whereas all the former differences are forgotten… And then you meet again and suddenly you recall that you never got on. You know what it's like… Just think of Sebastian Wilkes. You would never have taken the case if you had thought that he'd still be the same tosser as he'd been back at bloody Cambridge.'

'I knew he'd still be a tosser, but if you hadn't stabbed me in the back like that, he'd never have been able to demonstrate it so effectively,' Sherlock said defiantly.

John was taken aback.

'Excuse me?'

'You know what I'm talking about.'

'I really don't,' John protested in confusion. 'And I did write up the whole case.'

'You corrected me when I introduced you as my friend,' Sherlock stated, eyes blazing stormily.

John racked his brains, but there was nothing, just the general memory that Sebastian Wilkes had been an insufferable git and something about a watch.

'Sorry, I really don't remember, it was ages ago.'

'You said, "_Colleague_."'

A vague memory resurfaced in John's mind. Then suddenly a rush of guilt and sorrow seized him, almost threatening to choke him.

'God, Sherlock, I'm so sorry… I didn't mean… Has that been bothering you all this time?'

'No, don't be stupid. Afterwards I knew what you meant. It occurred to me that you must have thought that Sebastian was trying to imply… well. It only occurred to me afterwards. In the office… it was a bit not good.'

'I'm sorry, Sherlock, really,' John said emphatically, squeezing his friend's hand. 'But what can I say? I'm only an idiot, I can't help saying idiotic things sometimes.'

'No, you really can't help it,' Sherlock agreed, chuckling, and squeezed back.

Shortly afterwards, they finally got ready for bed, with Sherlock blocking the ensuite bathroom for a considerably longer time than John, emerging in a striking set of pyjamas that was more handsome (and probably far more expensive) than most people's daywear.

When John returned from his significantly shorter visit to the bathroom, he found that his friend had blocked the door with a chair.

'Did you take all that crap about possibly murderous fundamentalists prowling round in Reigate that seriously?' he asked, surprised.

'Oh, you never know,' Sherlock replied, shrugging, and lay down on the bed.

John sighed.

'I should have known you're secretly hoping that someone's going to attack us. Well, I'll leave them to you, I want to sleep.'

Getting into bed next to his friend, John quickly glanced at his mobile and saw that Mary had replied to his earlier message. He had felt it would be only fair to inform her that he and Sherlock would be sleeping in the same bed.

_Give him my love. And warn him that you start snoring during your second sleep cycle. x_

'I know you're a snorer,' Sherlock commented laconically.

'How did you…' John spluttered, amazed as ever, since his friend wasn't even facing him. There was no way that he could have read Mary's text.

'Oh please, that one was obvious,' was all the explanation that the consulting detective offered.

Just then, John's phone pinged with another text.

_And don't let him steal your pillow. x_

'Are you a notorious pillow stealer?' John asked his friend with a frown.

'Your _girlfriend_' (Sherlock always managed to make the term sound like an insult) 'merely inferred from the fact that my pillow at the flat is large, fluffy and of high-quality consistency that I would probably be less than satisfied with one of those unshapely, floppy little bales of cloth that the average Englishman tends to impose on his guests. She was right, obviously. She does have a decided genius for the detecting business. So, can I have your pillow now?'

'Nooo,' John insisted and put an end to the discussion by switching off the light.

_-SHSHSH-_

A couple of hours later, John realised that even the sloppy layer of fabric between his head and the mattress had disappeared.

How Sherlock had managed to acquire John's pillow without his noticing immediately, although he hadn't been asleep, was a mystery, though one that annoyed him more than it amazed him.

He had no success in retrieving it as Sherlock had also defied sleep so far and held onto it tightly when John tried to pull it away from under his head.

'I can't sleep,' he whined. 'This bedding is horribly scratchy and it's far too quiet outside.'

'I know,' John agreed. 'I miss the sound of cars, too, and the occasional ambulance. The silence out here seems eerily unreal. But that's the country for you.'

'The country is hell,' Sherlock rejoined.

For a couple of minutes, neither of them said anything.

'Do you think Mary likes me?' John asked all of a sudden, a question that had bothered him ever since they had first started dating.

A couple of years back, it wouldn't have bothered him at all. But now, the uncomfortable truth that he had already crossed the ominous 40 gradually sank in, and he found it less easy to go along with Mary's 'Let's just see where things take us'-policy than he would have two years ago.

And it was always so seductively easy to voice one's doubts when there was no light.

'Why are you asking me? I'm not your consulting matchmaker, am I?' Sherlock said disdainfully, clearly unwilling to have a confidential heart-to-heart, no matter whether the light was on or not.

'No, that'd be Jane Austen,' John quipped back, chuckling.

The mention of Jane Austen brought back the memory of watching _Emma_.

'You know what? Jane Austen reminded me of you quite a lot. I was watching _Emma_ with Mary and it wasn't all bad. Not all girly-feely stuff, I mean. Emma and Knightley were like a pair of detectives, trying to deduce all their neighbours little secrets. Though you'd probably have worked out that Jane Fairfax was secretly engaged to Frank Churchill before either of them arrived at Highbury.'

'True. I did, in fact.'

'You mean, you've what – you've read Jane Austen?'

'Of course I have, John. She's the single person to ever have written a decently clever novel. She was remarkably good at observations. She would have made a brilliant detective. Her texts are intricate little puzzles, full of fleeting hints and clues that she expects you to work out even if her characters fail to, at the time. She is one of the very few writers who seem to have taken my own axiom to heart, that the little things are infinitely the most important. All the details in her description add up. She would never have you believe that a character is a successful upstart architect when his tooth brushing habits clearly reveal him to be an unemployed estate agent, as it so often happens in those detestable thrillers that you insist on numbing your mind with.'

'I don't read them because I want them to be completely realistic and clever, you git. I get enough of that when I'm chasing criminals with you. It's just relaxing…' John defended himself with a lazy yawn.

Sherlock snorted incredulously.

'You don't make sense, John. You read books or go on holidays to _relax_.'

'You don't make sense, either,' John giggled, not bothering to mention that this was indeed a major reason why most people bought books or booked holidays. 'You love dead bodies and abhor all displays of feeling and now you're practically gushing over Jane Austen, the mother of all romance?'

'Oh shut up, John,' Sherlock retorted, but without malice.

'It would be great if you carried on with your gushiness for a bit, though. Mary plans to make me watch _Northanger Abbey _next. Tell me, what is it all about?'

So Sherlock launched into one of his long deductions, this time not settled around a crime scene, but around a young girl who had read too many novels and therefore twisted facts to suit her theories rather than theories to suit facts.

He described in detail how every halfway intelligent reader should have guessed from the discovery of the laundry bill that Eleanor Tilney had a lover roughly a hundred pages before this was explicitly stated in the text.

He talked and talked and John was reasonably certain that he carried on talking for a good while after having fallen asleep. He couldn't say for sure, though, as the sound of Sherlock's voice calmed him enough to drop off before he managed to pry away his pillow from beneath his sleeping friend's head.

So, improbable as it might be, both of them eventually slept.

_-SHSHSH-_

The next morning they accompanied Colonel Hayter to church.

It was bursting with seemingly good Christian believers. Apparently, one strange, ritualistic murder of a young woman known to have converted to the Islam had been enough to scare the entire parish into dominical displays of faith.

It was easy to see why the majority had previously shunned the service. The minister, a Mr Muldaur, held a dull, uninspired sermon. His feeble falsetto voice did nothing to render it any more gripping and life-changing. He might talk of tongues of angels or tongues of fire, but he certainly wasn't speaking in them.

For a brief second, John entertained the wicked thought that the murderer had been none other than Mr Muldaur himself, sacrificing one lamb to save all the others that had strayed away from the right path; aggressive marketing, so to speak.

Then he was distracted by another churchgoer who was intently watching Sherlock.

The man in question had to be in his late forties, although he put a lot of effort into preserving his looks. His skin was nicely tanned and his athletic physique spoke of daily workouts at the gym. Especially the shapely forearms made John go green with envy.

But what truly fazed him wasn't the man's imposing physique, admittedly far more imposing than John's, but something that he couldn't really name – something that filled him instinctively with dislike.

After the service Sherlock made a beeline for what John suspected was the local detective inspector.

John wanted to follow him, but he was arrested on the spot by the dazzling smile on one of the most beautiful female faces he had ever seen.

Unfortunately, it wasn't directed at him.

The young woman held one arm of a stuffed teddy bear, a small boy the other, and together they were playing 'One, two, three, whee!'

Then a man approaching them from behind scooped up the little boy with his teddy bear. The beautiful woman wrapped an arm around his waist and nestled against him. She was alternately beaming with Julia Roberts-like intensity at the little boy and at the man, as if they were the most beautiful thing that she had ever seen.

The sight nagged at John. Something in him wanted to be part of that panorama of perfect happiness. A happy family was the most perfect thing in the world, he realised. Maybe Mary had been wrong in saying that he didn't want any of that. Though now it was probably too late for that, anyway.

The noise of shouting dragged him out of his melancholic little reverie.

Sherlock was arguing with the local detective inspector, who evidently didn't want help with solving the fundamentalist murder and avidly refused to share any of the data that they had collected on it so far.

Seething, Sherlock stalked back to his blogger's side.

'Idiots,' he snarled.

'Don't let it bother you,' John said, resting a calming hand on his friend's arm, 'you can always hack their files again later.'

Gradually, the churchgoers dispersed.

As Colonel Hayter was still talking to the minister, John and Sherlock stayed put, waiting for him. However, the unlikable man who had been staring at Sherlock throughout the service also continued to linger.

With an exasperated sigh, Sherlock approached him, 'Mr Milverton.'

'Mr Holmes,' the addressee said with a thin-lipped smile and extended a hand. 'What a pleasure to meet you at last.'

Sherlock didn't take the offered hand.

Instead, he simply said, 'John, this is Charles Augustus Milverton.'

Milverton briefly glanced at John, but didn't extend his hand again.

'What brings you to Reigate, Mr Holmes? An investigation?'

'Unfortunately not. I've been forced on a holiday. And that moronic DI Forrester has just refused to let me in on the only thing that could possibly be investigated in this stupidly idyllic parish apart from the movement of cows,' Sherlock replied scathingly.

'Not everything in this parish is as straightforward as it may seem, Mr Holmes. Wherever there are human beings, there are secrets, too.'

'Of which you make a living, of course.'

'As do you. Though I fail to understand why anybody complains about it. Most people are so appallingly bad at hiding their shabby little secrets that they're really inviting it being brought to light,' Milverton said with a nasty little laugh.

'Most people simply fail to grasp that the art of disguise is to hide in plain sight.'

'Now that's my credo, too, Mr Holmes!'

He smiled slyly and glanced at his watch, a costly item, Swiss, undoubtedly.

'Excuse me, I really must be going. I have a highly interesting client waiting for me. Well, you can read all about it in tomorrow's paper, I'm sure. It was a pleasure to speak to you, Mr Holmes. A pleasure that I deeply hope to repeat. Here's my card. Feel free to visit any time your vacation bores you too much.'

And then he was gone.

'Who was that?' John asked his friend.

'The most despicable human being you've ever met, John. Charles Augustus Milverton. I did mention the name to you.'

'Sorry, didn't ring a bell.'

'He's a media mogul,' Sherlock explained, 'the main rival of Rupert Murdoch, to be precise, and England's leading blackmailer. The market for newspapers is tough, you're aware. Sinking numbers of readers, the menace of internet bloggers who are willing to share their knowledge and opinions for free, the decline in good advertisement strategies etcetera etcetera. Several of Milverton's publications have been perilously close to insolvency in the last couple of years. But mysterious benefactors always kept them going.'

'So – Milverton blackmailed people into financing his newspapers?'

'He collects information. Valuable information. Some of it he prints, some of it he doesn't print immediately, giving the concerned parties a chance to retrieve the compromising data. Against a price, of course.'

'How come nobody's managed to stop him so far?'

'Milverton's extremely careful. He doesn't send out threats by mail and keep his information in a safe. His house has been searched and his personal harddrives have been confiscated by the police more than once, but no incriminating evidence was ever found.'

'It would be easier to hide data here in the country, though, wouldn't it? You reckon that's why he's not staying in town?' John suggested, feeling quite pleased with himself for this stroke of brilliance.

'Probably, yes,' Sherlock assented, sounding bored.

'Where's Hayter gone off to?' John suddenly asked, looking around. 'I saw just now, talking to the minister over there…'

'He left when we were talking to Milverton. Charming host, isn't he?'

'I'm beginning to think that I only dreamt up his ever inviting us,' John joked, shaking his head.

'Are you finally ready to admit that this holiday lark was a mistake?' Sherlock asked hopefully.

'Nope,' John said, playfully poking his friend with the elbow. 'You're all better for it. I don't think I've heard you cough once this morning – the fresh country air seems to be working wonders for you.'

Sherlock scowled and refused to concede the point in question.

_-SHSHSH-_

In the afternoon the pair of holidaymakers went for a long walk.

When their path crossed a softly gurgling brook, they chanced across the little boy with the teddy bear whose remarkably beautiful mother had earlier caught John's attention. This time, his teddy bear was his only companion, though he didn't seem to mind the solitude.

He was happily sitting in the grass next to the little brook, teddy bear and drawing pad safely in his lap, trying to copy the different plants and weeds around him. Occasionally, his pink little tongue darted out of his mouth in his zealous attempts to capture the objects with as much exactitude as six years of age would allow.

When he saw them, he suddenly abandoned the drawing, jumped to his feet and waved.

'Hello,' he called out cheerfully, 'can I have your autograph? You're my favourite heroes.'

'Hello little man,' John greeted him with a smile. 'You know us?'

'Obviously,' Sherlock commented drily, rolling his eyes.

'You're Sherlock Holmes and John Watson. I read the blog and collect the articles of all your cases.'

'Wow, you can read!' John exclaimed, amazed. 'You're what – six?'

Sherlock rolled his eyes again, whereas the little boy said cheerfully, 'Yes, but I've been able to read since I was four.'

'Then school must be very boring for you.'

'I don't go to school. Miss Wilson teaches me everything.'

'His tutor,' Sherlock explained when he saw his friend frown.

'Isn't that lonely?' John asked.

'No, why?' the little boy wondered, evidently not able to imagine that his life could possibly be any different. 'Sir Anthony always keeps me company.'

Turning to face his teddy bear, he said, 'Sir Anthony, this is Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson. Say hello.'

John shook Sir Anthony's paw. Sherlock only scowled at him.

'Sir Anthony is so excited to meet you,' the little boy explained. 'He wanted to talk to you after church, and I did, but Auntie Annie said that it would be rude to disturb you.'

So the beautiful woman hadn't been the mother but an aunt, John realised. For some reason, the thought made him feel much lighter. The delightful display of caring, trust and security hadn't been a postcard father-mother-child idyll. There was hope for him yet.

'And who are you, little man?' John asked, crouching down next to the boy.

'My name's Aloysius Mellon, please.'

'Your father is Arthur Mellon, I take it?' Sherlock asked, still rather stiff and detached.

'Yes. Do you know that we're related?' Aloysius asked, unfazed by Sherlock's lack of affability.

John looked from one to the other, surprised, before it occurred to him that all old English families were probably related in some way, which was confirmed by his friend's next words.

'Very loosely. Your father's second cousin is the what? half-brother of a third cousin of mine on my mother's side, I think?'

'On your father's side, actually. I can trace the family tree all the way back to William the Conqueror,' Aloysius announced proudly. 'You're a lot more closely related to me than he is, though.'

'Naturally. You're staying with your mother's family, the Cunninghams, then?'

'Yes, I spend all my holidays here with Auntie Paulina. Mummy's sister. Mummy and Daddy are always very busy, so when Miss Wilson is on leave, I always come here.'

'So you've got holidays now?' John asked with what he hoped was a cheery smile, while he secretly pitied the little boy for being so left alone.

'Yes. This year it's very early, though, so I've been able to examine blowballs and red damselflies with the microscope that Auntie Paulina gave to me. Did you know that some blowballs have more than 180 seeds?'

'Did you count them? That's amazing,' John said, secretly wondering if Sherlock had just made a new little friend, because the consulting detective now crouched down next to them, too, and pointed out the sixty-four decisive differences between three dandelion species which were growing around them.

To John, they all seemed pretty similar, but then he had never really grasped the intricate differences in tobacco ash, either, whereas Aloysius listened, enthralled.

From dandelions they gradually moved on to the various insects which Aloysius was currently studying with his microscope. Sherlock listened with unfeigned interest as the little boy outlined all his findings and was on his feet in no time when Aloysius offered to show him his microscope.

Thus they found themselves within the large Cunningham estate half an hour's walk later.

It reminded John strongly of Hartfield and the owner, the Mr Cunningham senior, seemed every bit as hypochondriac as Mr Woodhouse. His elder daughter, the earlier mentioned Auntie Paulina, had declined all options of independence and marriage to stay with him, rather like a good old-fashioned period drama heroine.

However, five minutes in her resolute presence were enough to convince John that she wasn't a gentle and good little daughter catering to all her father's whims. Instead, she seemed to have the entire household down to pat.

After scolding Aloysius for walking along with strangers just like that, she welcomed Sherlock with all the warm respect that one member of a very good old family feels for the offspring of another and complimented John on his blog.

She took her host duties seriously and insisted that they sat down for a cup of tea before taking a look at Aloysius's microscope.

Soon, Sherlock managed to steer the conversation towards the girl that had been murdered.

'Dreadful business,' Paulina agreed, calmly sipping her tea, 'though I can't say I'm sorry that she's dead. Did Hayter tell you that Inessa used to date a Turkish football player? He played for Tottenham, I think. Not sure, football's not really my thing. Anyway, she was a stupid little slut, left school without qualifications, not good at anything apart from spending money and pretending that she was important. Well, you'd know what those parvenus are like, Sherlock.'

'Embarrassing and annoying?' Sherlock prompted, leaning forward slightly and tilting his head to the side.

The pose seemed familiar to John, but he couldn't immediately place it.

'Just so. The first time I met her was at a charity ball and she was so terribly drunk by the end of the evening that she vomited all over poor Annie's shoes.'

Sherlock blinked and managed to look scandalised.

'Who's Annie?' John asked, wanting to know more about the woman with the beautiful smile that he'd seen outside the church.

'Oh, Annie Morrison, my brother Alex's fiancée. You must have seen her at church earlier. She's hard to miss. All golden and sweet. Unlike Inessa.'

'She reminds me very much of that other football player's wife, it was in the papers a couple of days ago…' Sherlock said, leaning forward even further.

Suddenly, John realised two things.

One: His friend, who claimed that he had no interest in who was sleeping with whom, must have done a quick internet search on WAGs. Two: His friend was imitating the body language of Mary and Mrs Hudson when they traded gossip in the kitchen. And it was working brilliantly.

'Oh you mean that thing with Coleen Rooney. Yes. I read that. Yes. Inessa was worse, though. She accustomed herself to a very high standard of living, shopping and parties all the time, and didn't realise that nothing, _nothing_ entitled her to this lifestyle apart from her boyfriend's bank account.'

'So he left her eventually?' Sherlock asked.

'Yes. He moved to a club in Spain, she came with him, but she didn't settle in well. No surprises there. He was surrounded by all kinds of hot Southern chicks who thought he was brilliant while she sat in their villa and complained all day long because she didn't speak a word of Spanish. He had an affair, she tried to win him back by converting to the Islam, but in the end, none of it worked to bind him to her and they broke up.'

'So she returned to England, heavily indebted, knowing how to spend money but not how to make it?' Sherlock suggested.

'Exactly. In the end, after all the glamorous life that she'd had, she worked as a cleaner at the Aston's place.'

'And that's where she was killed, right?'

Paulina nodded.

At this point, their cosy little gossiping was interrupted by the entrance of Paulina's elder brother, Ernest Cunningham. He was scowling furiously and exhibited a taciturn, snobbish personality. When his sister asked him to fetch the lemonade from the kitchen, he refused.

'Why can't Kirwan do it?'

'It's not part of his responsibilities.'

'Then I really don't see the use in employing him,' Ernest Cunningham said coldly.

'Look, we've discussed this. I'm not completely happy with him, either, but he maintains the building well enough in comparison to some of the facility managers of our neighbours. If you weren't such a die-hard Tory, Ernest, you'd know that we can't expect to have a perfect _butler_ in the house who's served the family for generations and is devoted to it with every fibre, I've told you before. So please just go fetch the lemonade.'

'I can do it,' Aloysius offered.

'No, the jug's far too heavy for you, dear,' Paulina said.

'I don't need someone who's devoted to the family and our honour and God knows what, but I think I can expect to have an employee here in this house who does what he's told,' Ernest Cunningham interjected angrily. 'And that bastard William Kirwan always talks back at me. He even dares to explain his methods, like I care.'

'He knows his trade best, I suppose,' Paulina tried to pacify him.

'I don't think that a man who hasn't been to Cambridge has the right to lecture me. Or to talk to me at all.'

John carefully kept his eyes on his cup of tea, embarrassed at having to witness this argument and indignant at Ernest Cunningham's snobbery, while Sherlock watched their hosts with the impassive and unabashed disdain of a private school brat.

The discussion would have carried on forever, undoubtedly, had not Annie Morrison and her fiancé Alex Cunningham entered the room.

Annie Morrison's smile proved to be so radiant that not even Ernest Cunningham or Sherlock (as John noted with satisfaction) were able to maintain a scowl when confronted with it.

After another set of introductions, Ernest Cunningham brought himself to actually fetch the lemonade, and from that point on, the conversation moved back into calmer waters.

_-SHSHSH-_

'Look, can you see what this is?' Aloysius asked after they had finally managed to make their escape from the drawing room downstairs.

John almost choked on his drink.

He really hoped this wasn't what he thought it was. To him, the drawing looked like a spermatozoon. He really hoped that Miss Wilson hadn't already explained the topic of reproduction to Aloysius. The boy was only six, after all.

John desperately fished for another comparison, but was unable to see anything else than sperm in the picture.

It reminded him of his sessions with Ella.

At first, she thought that he was sexually perverse, because he spotted genitalia in nearly every bad scribbling that she'd held in front of his face. He had read it in her notes. So then he refrained from ever mentioning any kind of likelihood to human reproductive organs. Then she noted down that he was repressed.

After that, he tried to find a healthy balance between spotting too many genitalia and discovering none at all, but that hadn't made Ella happy either. By then, she had realised that he was reading her writing upside down. And settled for 'trust issues' instead of 'hypersexual' or 'repressed'.

As much as he was aiming for 'repressed' now, John couldn't make out anything other than spermatozoon. He could feel a hot blush creeping up his cheeks.

It made him think back to a memorable meeting with his uncle back when he'd barely hit puberty. His uncle had drawn an umbrella and asked him what it was. He'd said it was an umbrella.

Then his uncle had turned the drawing on its head and asked him what it was now. John didn't know. So then his uncle told him that it was a man getting out of a bathtub. Afterwards, John had blushed every time he'd seen an umbrella and Harry had teased him about it mercilessly.

And now all he could think of was sperm, sperm, sperm.

Jokingly, he therefore guessed, 'A snake that swallowed an elephant?'

Aloysius and Sherlock, these two fantastical creatures, these two little princes, stared at him as though he'd gone mad. Neither of them seemed to get the joke.

'Don't be an idiot, John!' Sherlock reprimanded and opened his mouth to correct the statement.

John hastily clapped a hand over his mouth, really not wanting Sherlock to give the poor little boy a highly scientific talk about the birds and the bees.

Sherlock stepped back, looking affronted.

'I wasn't aware that suffocating me was part of my recovery regime.'

Then, after thinking it over for a second or two, he added with a pout, 'I wasn't going to criticise the drawing, if that's what you think. It's a perfectly decent tadpole. You must be blind not to recognise it as such. Do you even know what a snake's head is formed like? It's nowhere near this round. And it's virtually impossible for a snake to swallow an elephant.'

'The biggest animal that an anaconda can eat is a caiman,' Aloysius piped up.

'I believe you, I believe you!' John hastily gave in and lifted up both hands in defeat. He bit the inside of his cheek to keep himself from bursting out laughing.

'I examined the tadpole through my microscope,' the little boy recounted happily and Sherlock listened to him full of interest.

'Do you still have some frogspawn here?' he asked enthusiastically. 'There's an experiment that I've been meaning to do for ages.'

'Oh no!' John interjected. 'You're not importing frogspawn into our flat! Or into Hayter's home! No!'

'But John!' Sherlock protested and tried for his best kicked-puppy-look.

However, for once, John remained firm.

'Don't be sad, Sherlock,' Aloysius comforted him. 'I'll give you a copy of my tadpole documentation. I did it for Mummy, originally. I'm going to give it to her when she comes to pick me up.'

'But you know that's not going to happen,' Sherlock said decidedly.

'What do you mean?' Aloysius asked.

'Sherlock, no!' John cut in imperiously, sensing an upcoming catastrophe of epic proportions. 'Whatever you're going to say – just don't!'

'But I want to know!' Aloysius protested.

'He deserves to know!' Sherlock insisted.

John grabbed his friend's arm and looked at him imploringly.

'Please, Sherlock, don't…'

Undeterred, Sherlock launched into his explanation, 'Your mother's not going to pick you up because you're going to stay here for good. This is your new home. Evidence? The rooms have been renovated, wall-paper, furniture, everything, even a brand-new microscope. Not to mention the telling fact that you're here earlier this year than normally. The reason for moving you here and at this time? Your father has left your mother, as is evident from the fact that this room only has pictures of you and your mother, never your father. Your aunt, who redecorated the room and put up the pictures, obviously didn't want any reminders of your father in them and being your mother's sister, the most likely cause for her dislike of him would be his infidelity. This is enforced by the fact that your tutor Miss Wilson isn't here with you, although the general summer holidays are still several weeks away. So it is only intelligent to make the assumption that she is no longer your tutor because she is the reason that your father decided to leave your mother. Theoretically, you could be staying with your mother, then, but that doesn't seem to have been an option. A possible explanation would be that she's dead, but that's unlikely, because my annoying brother Mycroft would have forced me to sign a condolence card in that case, as he's terribly fussy about family matters. So, if she isn't dead, why isn't your mother taking care of you, rather than your Aunt Paulina? Simple explanation, clearly illustrated by her hairstyles in the various pictures in this room: She is being treated for bipolar disorder in hospital and it is unlikely that she will ever leave it again. So conclusion: No one is going to pick you up.'

Aloysius stared at him. For a moment, the little boy was too shocked to react. Then he gulped and silent tears started to run down his face.

'Aloysius, I'm so sorry…' John said hesitantly, reaching out a hand.

'Why didn't they tell me?' the little boy asked quietly, his bottom lip trembling.

'They thought it would be kinder. They always do. It never is, though,' Sherlock said in a low voice, almost making John forget his anger because it explained so much.

Aloysius gulped again and then all but threw himself at Sherlock, burying his head in the detective's shirt and now finally crying in earnest.

Helplessly, Sherlock glanced at John who mouthed at him to put his arms around the crying little boy. Hesitantly, Sherlock obeyed and after a couple of minutes, he even started caressing the boy's hair without being prompted to do so.

John looked on, genuinely astonished. This was the first time that a person given the choice had sought comfort with Sherlock and not with John. And it was certainly the first time that a person who'd been hurt by the consulting detective's deductions hadn't run away in tears but clung to him and cried.

Maybe John wasn't the only one who saw the similarities between the little boy and his best friend.

The mythical, other-worldly life of Aloysius, away from children of his age, somewhat abandoned by the responsible adults, left to his own devices in mysterious, large, dark houses matched his mental image of what Sherlock's childhood had been like.

Probably his friend would scoff at him and chide him for romanticising his early years if he knew what they looked like in John's imagination.

But seeing how Aloysius obviously felt drawn to Sherlock and how his friend, on a fundamental level, seemed to understand their little new acquaintance and had met him with surprising levels of tolerance and friendliness gave John's mental image an astonishing degree of verisimilitude.

Gradually, Aloysius calmed himself and emerged from the comforting cocoon of Sherlock's arms.

Wiping his eyes resolutely, he announced, 'I'm going to speak to Auntie Paulina and ask her when we're going to visit Mummy in hospital. And then I'm going to bring her my tadpole documentation. Do you think that will make her happy?'

'Yes, I think so,' John agreed hastily, trying to smile reassuringly and patted his head.

'But I'm going to make you a copy first, Sherlock,' the little boy continued. 'You really are my friend, aren't you? You're never going to lie to me?'

'I'll try not to,' Sherlock promised somewhat solemnly.

They proceeded to Alex Cunningham's private office where according to Aloysius there was a printer with automatic document feeder, which the little boy seemed to think one of the most wonderful inventions in the history of men.

Soon Aloysius started skipping steps again and chattered cheerfully on about how he wanted to own such a fantastic printer, too, when he was grown up, all sorrows seemingly forgotten. But he was clutching Sir Anthony a little more tightly to his chest.

After having copied his neat stack of drawings and observations on tadpoles, Aloysius took a pen from his uncle's desk and carefully wrote the following words on the front page,

_To Sherlock, who really is my friend, a practical handbook of tadpole develloppment with anotations on climat and veggetation. Aloysius Mellon, explorer_

Looking at the dedication with its charming little spelling mistakes and its childlike zest, John smiled and thought in relief that maybe, maybe, everything was fine, after all, and Sherlock hadn't broken the poor little boy with his deductions.

Aloysius decided to accompany them on their walk back to Colonel Hayter's house and offered to show them all the short-cuts that he knew, as long as they made a solemn oath not to tell anyone else.

Thus they eventually crossed a field full of dark brown cows.

Sherlock eyed them warily and muttered, 'There are cows, John. Loose. Cows. The country is hell.'

'Don't worry, Sherlock, they're harmless,' Aloysius called out, hopping along in front of them.

'John, that one is looking at me!' Sherlock said with growing anxiety.

'Just carry on walking,' John instructed him and took his arm. 'Don't look at it and it won't look at you. Remember: It's not interested in you, it's just interested in the grass.'

'But John, it's really staring at me!'

John was just about to revise part of his mental image of Sherlock's childhood, as the man's discomfort in close proximity to cows seemed to rule out his growing up on a large country estate, when he felt his friend trip over some kind of small stone or twig.

A second later, the genius consulting detective was lying flat on the grass.

Before John could help him get up, the cow that according to Sherlock had been watching him all the time, but which was certainly watching him now approached and placed itself directly above the consulting detective.

Sherlock turned around on his back and looked up at the cow above him in horror.

Meanwhile the cow looked down at him with a lot more tranquillity, chewing calmly.

The contrast was so comical that John couldn't help laughing out loud and regretted that he hadn't brought his camera with him.

'John! Make it go away!' Sherlock shouted in panic.

The cow mooed lazily in return.

'John, do something!'

Shaking with laughter despite all the sympathy that he felt for his distressed friend, John was unable to oblige him.

Luckily, Aloysius stepped in. He patted the cow in the right places and made the right noises and quickly succeeded in making it back off a little.

'Are you alright, Sherlock?' he asked and tried to help the consulting detective to his feet.

Gingerly, Sherlock raised himself.

Breathing heavily, he replied in a grave, shaken voice, 'I suppose I am as fine as anybody can be expected to be after escaping certain death by a hairbreadth.'

John sniggered at his friend's dramatics.

Aloysius, who had a more pronounced sympathetic streak, patted Sherlock's hand and said, 'You can hold Sir Anthony, if you like.'

And Sherlock really had to be in a state of complete shock, because he didn't even make an attempt to refuse the teddy bear and carried him all the rest of their way home.

_-SHSHSH-_

'Isn't it beautiful?' John asked, stepping next to Sherlock, who was standing in front of the window, gazing at the falling sun.

'It's hateful. All calm and peaceful. The country's hateful.'

'Oh shut up, you! Don't be such a killjoy! We had a nice day, didn't we?'

'Can't we just go home?'

'No! This is supposed to be good for you, remember?'

'I'm bored.'

'You weren't bored earlier when that cow _examined_ you.'

'Not an experience I care to repeat, thank you. And I'm bored now.'

'Then go to bed.'

'Why must you be so ordinary, John, and always say the same things?'

'Could say the same about you. Now stop complaining and go to bed.'

'But I don't want to sleep. And that mattress is a nightmare.'

Exasperated, John turned away. He refused to continue this argument. Knowing Sherlock, it would go on forever if he talked back.

Just then, the sky outside darkened all of a sudden. At great speed dark grey rain-clouds approached and a second later, it began to rain, while the slanting rays of the setting sun still stole their way through the cloudless patches of the sky.

Sherlock's whole expression changed, turning from one of boredom to one of delight.

'Let's go outside!' he cried out excitedly.

'What? No! It's raining!'

'That's the point!'

'You're supposed to be recovering! Getting wet won't improve your health!'

'Don't be such a bore, John!' Sherlock retorted and dashed out of the room and down the stairs.

John followed on his heels.

In the corridor leading up to the front door they passed their host Colonel Hayter, who had just come back from his afternoon shift at the garage and looked at them as if they were two raving lunatics.

Laughing brightly, like a happy child, Sherlock ran through the rain, sometimes jumping over puddles on the lane and the meadows, sometimes purposefully jumping into them.

'You're mad! You're barking mad!' John shouted out, a huge grin on his face as his friend splashed him by jumping into a puddle right next to him.

'That's what you love so much about me,' Sherlock quipped, chuckling.

'Oh yeah,' John agreed, laughing happily along.

Sherlock's wet curls were plastered to his forehead, making him look much less imposing, more like a schoolboy. His elegant clothes, probably ruined beyond repair, clung to his body, emphasising his lanky frame. Frankly, he looked ridiculous. But he was beaming and enjoying himself immensely all the same.

John suspected he looked just as silly and added this experience to his mental list of the most ridiculous and most brilliant things that he'd ever done.

'There's some blue sky! Let's chase it!'

The words were fully out of his mouth before he was even aware of having wanted to say them. Damn Mary and her period drama, John thought.

Sherlock stared at him, nonplussed, but that didn't stop him from sprinting after John all the same. At least he did his friend the favour of not falling over and spraining his ankle.

They ran all the way up to the top of a near-by, blessedly cow-free hill. Standing there, they had a marvellous view into the valley, exposing the Cunningham's estate as well as a couple of other large country houses, their roofs all gleaming golden.

And right in front of them, the slanting rays of the setting sun and the rain united into a radiant ensemble of colour and natural, nay almost supernatural beauty: a rainbow.

It hovered above the valley, tenderly, lovingly, like a guardian angel.

John put his arm around Sherlock and smiled.

'Don't tell me that's boring.'

'Would it be okay if I told you it's physics?' Sherlock chuckled.

'Yeah,' John laughed and squeezed his friend. 'Coming from you, that's the equivalent of _breathtakingly beautiful_.'

After a quiet moment where both just stared ahead at the picturesque view in front of them, enjoying what they saw and enjoying that they could share it with each other, John said: 'Come on, let's get back inside, you're shivering!'

'I'll be the first to take a shower!' Sherlock announced mischievously and began to sprint back towards Colonel Hayter's home.

John tried to outpace him, but had to acknowledge himself beaten half-way back.

There was no beating Sherlock Holmes to the shower even though the man currently had recourse to less than one hundred per cent of his physical fitness. Damn those long legs!

_-SHSHSH-_

The next morning, John quickly satisfied himself that his friend hadn't suffered any lasting damage from being exposed to the rain. His vicious cough hadn't returned, his temperature was perfectly normal and his face was less pale and wan.

On the whole, he looked the best and healthiest John had seen him since his return from Stuttgart. So far, their trip to the countryside appeared to have the desired effect.

When their breakfast was interrupted, even Sherlock would have called their holiday a success, because Aloysius burst into the room, shouting, 'There's been another murder! William Kirwan is dead.'

It was impossible to say who looked more gleeful at this piece of news, the consulting detective or the little boy himself.

John merely sighed.

'What is it about you that people start going on a manic killing spree whenever you're near?'

'Technically, the first murder occurred well before I arrived on the scene,' Sherlock defended himself.

'Technically, there's no reason for you to be part of the scene, now,' John retorted drily. 'We're on a holiday, remember?'

'John, I've been consulted by this poor little boy who is probably heavily traumatised by the events he witnessed. I cannot possibly let him down. What are you thinking, you hard-hearted bastard?' Sherlock asked overemphatically and put on his most heart-breaking kicked-puppy-face.

Promptly, his little friend and fan copied the expression.

Being faced with two endearing puppy-looks, no matter how fake, was too much for John.

'Alright,' he gave in grudgingly, 'but you will tell me if you feel any worse. And we will take it slowly. And you will eat and sleep and take your supplements and you won't go off on your own.'

'Of course I won't,' Sherlock agreed, pretending to be shocked. 'I'd be lost without my blogger.'

Their ensuing giggles were short-lived, because just then Ernest Cunningham entered the room, his trademark scowl firmly in place.

'Forgive the intrusion, Mr Holmes, but Aloysius was impatient to inform you of the unhappy events at our place.'

John noted how he didn't apologise to their host, Colonel Hayter. Maybe there had been even more truth in his snobbish remark that anybody who hadn't graduated from Cambridge wasn't worth talking to than John had initially supposed.

'No trouble at all,' Sherlock said smoothly. 'I'd be happy to be of assistance to you in this hour of need.'

John tried to hide his sniggering behind his cup of coffee. He wondered whether Sherlock was actively playing up to the Cambridge graduate part and if he realised how much that made him sound like his pompous older brother.

Colonel Hayter looked on, completely unmoved, neither perturbed by the murder nor amused by Sherlock's theatrics.

'I'm sure that our local policemen will be able to handle the case just fine,' Ernest Cunningham said, his voice still apologetic, 'but Aloysius insisted.'

'Sir Anthony insisted, too,' Aloysius piped up, waving his teddy bear.

'Well, we really mustn't disappoint Sir Anthony, must we?' Sherlock commented with a sly smile and rose from his chair. 'What, don't glare at me like that, John, I've eaten all my breakfast.'

'And by _all_ you mean half a slice of toast?'

John sighed and then surrendered with all the unhappy grace of a parent who can't help but give in to his spoilt child's every wish despite his better judgement, 'Alright. But there's no way we're skipping lunch today.'

'You can take the car, if you like, Watson,' Colonel Hayter suddenly offered when they made to leave. 'In the summer, I always go to the garage on bike, so I won't need it.'

It was by far the friendliest thing Hayter has said since their arrival, so John felt no need to turn it down out of politeness.

Though he wasn't exactly looking forward to driving with Sherlock, come to think of it. His best friend was a lousy driver, too immersed in his undoubtedly spectacular musings to bother thinking about the gears.

'I'll come with you,' Aloysius announced happily. 'I can fill you in on all the data that I've collected so far.'

For a brief moment, John stared at the overenthusiastic little boy, something wistful tugging painfully at his sober, aged heart. Yesterday's crazy escapade in the rain seemed like a distant, unattainable memory, and all youthful enthusiasm locked away in a secret garden to which he'd lost the key.

But then Sherlock roused him, eyes agleam, 'Come on, John, there's a murderer to catch!'

And suddenly the sun-bright, sparkling enthusiasm that he'd observed in their little companion bubbled up inside John, too, and he sprinted along, giggling in joyful anticipation.

_-SHSHSH-_

DI Forrester looked violently displeased when they arrived at the estate.

'I don't remember inviting you on this invitation, Mr Holmes.'

'But I did,' Aloysius piped up. 'And Sir Anthony.'

'I don't doubt that you would have done amazingly well with this investigation on your own, detective inspector,' Sherlock said in a lazy drawl, 'but I couldn't possibly refuse the clients who consulted me, since they are intimate relations of mine. And considering how deeply _you_ are indebted to the Cunningham family, you surely wouldn't want to cross their wishes in this question.'

Paying no further heed to DI Forrester, who blushed furiously at these insinuations, the consulting detective swept inside.

In the entrance hall of Cunningham House William Kirwan was lying on his back, his eyes closed, his hands peacefully folded on his chest, a small wooden cross forced between the stiff fingers. Two candles stood on either side of his shoulders, forming another cross together with the body. They had burnt down with bits of wax dripping on the gleaming marble tiles.

Overall, it was a picture of quiet and calm, almost as if the dead facility manager's body was lying in state. The only mild disturbance of this peaceful image was the knife that stuck in the middle of William Kirwan's chest.

Sherlock took one look at the body before he burst out laughing.

'Care to tell us what's so funny about a dead body?' DI Forrester asked in scandalised tones.

'No,' Sherlock remarked snippily.

After a dramatic little pause, he added, 'I can tell you one thing, though: We're not looking for an evangelical Holy Warrior.'

* * *

So, did anybody guess already how Sherlock deduced that?

Please review if you'd be so kind.

And if anybody knows how to make questions marks appear in the summary, please contact me, because I'm to stupid to do so. It keeps on disappearing every time I press "Save".


	3. Chapter 3

I'm really sorry that it took so long to post this chapter and I hope that the length of it will make up for the long wait. Chapter 4 is mostly written already, so the next update should be a bit quicker.

Many thanks to my wonderful beta **Ivory Winter **who made this chapter a lot better than it was. I can't thank her enough for all her meticulous, patient and generally inspiring support. All remaining mistakes are mine, of course.

As ever, thank you for reading - and I'd be delighted to hear your thoughts.

* * *

**Chapter 3**

'What makes you so sure of that?' DI Forrester asked.

Sherlock rolled his eyes.

'How do you think William Kirwan died, Detective Inspector?'

'He was obviously stabbed in the chest with a knife.'

Sounding bored, Sherlock turned towards his friend.

'John, do enlighten the good inspector on the actual cause of death.'

Crouching down next to the corpse, John started a quick examination.

Once he was reasonably certain that he had picked up on all there was to be noticed, at least from a medical point of view, he looked up again and said, 'He's been dead for something between six and nine hours, I'd say, going by development of rigor mortis and body temperature. So he must have been killed sometime after midnight. Cause of death: cervical fracture. There are faint marks of fingers on his neck, thumbs pointing towards the back of his head, the rest of the fingers wrapped around the front of the neck – so someone else standing or kneeling behind him must have snapped his neck. The marks are very faint and the fracture is extremely neat, thus he can't have struggled at all. Therefore the killer must be someone who is well-trained in martial arts and knows how to perform the action in one quick move – a professional, I'd say, maybe army, maybe secret service.'

DI Forrester swallowed, eyes bulging in bewilderment, while Sherlock smiled smugly. John took that as a good sign that the conclusions he had drawn from his own observations were correct and continued.

'As for the knife wound on his chest, it's very clean and it hasn't bled a lot, so it must have been inflicted post-mortem.'

'Wow! That was clever!' exclaimed Aloysius.

He started jotting down the most important of John's observations in his large, careful handwriting, beads of perspiration appearing on his concentrated face. John noticed that he was using the pen he'd picked up at his uncle's office the previous day when dedicating his tadpole treatise to Sherlock. As was to be expected from such a sophisticated writing instrument in the yet untrained, small hands of a child, Aloysius greatly struggled to keep up.

Though probably, were John to propose that he should use a pen more suitable for his age, the little boy would have been scandalised. Clearly, he took the investigation very, very seriously.

In more ways than one John found this utterly adorable. Once again, he wondered if Sherlock might have been like that at this tender age, too. For good measure, he took a picture with his phone that he intended to send to Mary. He strongly suspected that she would think it adorable, too.

'Thank you, John,' Sherlock drawled in evident satisfaction and started pacing in lazy circles around the body of William Kirwan. 'Now, my dear Inspector, while I am shocked by your general incompetency of not being able to recognise that there should have been more prominent blood splatters on the body and on the floor, had he been stabbed to death, what I find even more remarkable is that you immediately jumped to the conclusion that these murders must be the work of a bloodthirsty Christian fanatic. Evidently, this erroneous thinking – or rather lack of thinking - derives from the fact that your own teenage sister was murdered by a group of Satanists thirty-two years ago.'

He brandished his smartphone with a superior smirk. John could make out the outlines of an old newspaper article.

DI Forrester paled, eyes bulging even more. He looked ready to strangle the consulting detective. John watched him avidly, ready to intervene at the first sign that the policeman would actually try to hurt his friend.

'Sherlock,' he said warningly, in the vain wish that his friend would just once stop from needlessly provoking violence in others.

'What are Satanists?' Aloysius asked. 'Do they come from hell?'

Nobody answered him. Sir Anthony looked just as clueless, so he strolled down the hall in search of his aunt, to have her explain it to the pair of them.

Completely oblivious to the anger that he was provoking, Sherlock carried on with his deductions.

'Evidently, the use of Christian symbols instantly triggered the memory of what must have been a traumatic experience.'

'Sherlock,' John warned again.

'As there is no such thing as a coincidence, it seems reasonable to conclude that the killer was aware of your past trauma and banked on its blinding you to any other clues that he might accidentally have left. From this, it is only a logical leap to assume that the killer is a local. There you go, Detective Inspector. Had you actually taken a look at the corpse and tried to _think_, instead of wallowing in self-pity and guilt and other useless sentiments over an event long past, you might have reached the same conclusion.'

John saw the muscles in DI Forrester's arm contract and readied himself to intercept the blow, no matter how well-deserved it might be, when Sherlock's phone suddenly started ringing, startling everybody enough to prevent any immediate lapse into physical violence.

Sherlock both answered and ended his call with a rude bark of 'Piss off, Mycroft!'

Turning back to DI Forrester, he added smoothly, 'Do excuse my language, Inspector.'

The expression on the policeman's face on hearing Sherlock's apology for his use of swear when another apology would have been much more due was priceless. John knew he ought to have told off his friend, but he could hardly suppress his sniggering.

Then his own ringtone went off.

'What do you want, Mycroft?' he asked exasperatedly.

'Tell Sherlock to leave the case alone,' came the smooth reply.

'It's too late for that now. Enjoy your French breakfast!' John said forcefully and ended the call.

Rubbing his hands, he said, 'Well, we should get going with the investigation, shouldn't we, before the smarmy bastard comes and drags us away, right?'

Sherlock chuckled, looking adorably pleased with how resolutely his friend had brushed off Mycroft's attempts at interference.

'Of course. Now if you would excuse us, Inspector, we've got a murderer to catch. Have a lovely day!'

With that, the consulting detective swept out of the room with his usual dramatic flourish, John in his wake.

DI Forrester stared after them, too stunned to stop them, his bulging eyes threatening to pop out of their sockets.

As soon as they were out of ear-shot, John rounded on his friend, 'You were very successful at distracting him, but don't think that it worked on me – I'm not stupid, you know.'

Sherlock smirked.

'I can't imagine what gives you that idea.'

'Don't try to rile me up,' John protested with a grin, 'I won't be distracted until you tell me how you knew that we're not dealing with a Christian lunatic who happens to have undergone professional combat training?'

'When you first looked at the crime scene, what did you think?' Sherlock asked, fixing John with one of his disturbingly intense stares, overflowing with the highest expectations, begging his companion with every fibre of his being to be very, very clever and to get everything right for once.

Unfortunately, John felt that he wasn't very, very clever and that he would never pick up on all that Sherlock wanted him to. His shoulders drooped of their own accord. He was disappointed with himself for disappointing his friend.

'I don't know,' he mumbled, intimidated by the intensity of his friend's focus on him. 'Stagy. It looked stagy, I thought.'

Sparkles of pleasure appeared in Sherlock's quicksilver eyes.

'Very good, John,' he muttered appraisingly and started tapping away on his smartphone.

A second later the screen of Sherlock's smartphone was shoved right in front of John's face. On it there was a grainy YouTube video showing a man harassing a woman on stage, both singing Italian. In large yellow letters, the subtitles read 'This is the kiss of Tosca!' when the woman probably shrieked the Italian equivalent in high notes and jabbed a knife into the odious man's chest. The man yelled and cursed, then, mercifully, he was dead at last, whereupon the woman laid him out on the floor, put two candles on either side of him, placed a cross on his bloodied breast, closed his eyes and carefully exited the stage.

'So – what you're saying basically is that the killer's an opera lover?' John asked carefully, looking up at his friend.

'You're in sparkling form today, John,' Sherlock acknowledged with more pride than bite.

'Great, then this investigation should be a walk in the park,' John joked. 'We'll just ask everybody if they like going to the opera. I'm sure we'll find a culprit before lunchtime.'

Giggling like a naughty pair of schoolboys, they walked on.

_-SHSHSH-_

The first person they interviewed was Paulina, whose mouth was set in a thin, firm line when they entered.

Without preamble, she began, 'I hope the next time you're about to make a series of possibly upsetting deductions in front of my nephew, you'll come to me first and grant me the right to tell him. Are we understood?'

Sherlock nodded like a demure little boy, making John wonder whether he should ask Paulina for some parenting advice, as her strict, no-nonsense approach hadn't even failed with his spoilt brat of a flatmate – it would be heavenly to have his friend agree to everything that _he_ said just as easily.

'Good,' she said, her face, voice and general manner becoming slightly friendlier, and patiently answered all the questions that Sherlock bombarded her with.

It turned out that, yes, she loved the opera, of course she did. Unfortunately, she only rarely had the chance to go, though, as she couldn't leave her father for long. He'd been an invalid ever since she went away to university; he couldn't spare her.

No, she hadn't heard anything particular during the night. Yes, she'd been aware that William Kirwan had the habit of sneaking into the house after midnight. He was a thief and he had a key, so there was no stopping him. It was so difficult to find a different facility manager these days; they simply hadn't been able to get rid of him.

And luckily, his stealing hadn't been very bad. He'd been too stupid to tell what was really valuable, could you imagine that? Mostly he'd just taken a couple of wine bottles – and she'd been careful to always lay them out in such a way as would induce him to pick the bottles that they'd received as gifts and wouldn't like to drink anyway.

'Has anything else in the house disappeared recently?' Sherlock then wanted to know.

'Oh, you know what it's like with these big country houses – things keep on appearing and disappearing all the time. We're frequently entertaining guests, and they just take things from one place and leave them in another. Or they accidentally take some of our things with them or leave their things here. It's a constant mess and - much as I hate it - I've stopped trying to stay on top of things, for it would surely drive me mad. And then of course there's Aloysius now – and children always have a knack of making a mess. No, darling, it's alright, don't fret,' she added for her little nephew's benefit.

'But nothing important was taken? Nothing whose absence you would immediately notice?'

'No,' she shook her head.

'And what kind of guests have you had lately? Anybody unusual or unfamiliar? Anybody to see Kirwan, perhaps?'

'No. Just the regulars – old Acton, the Hills, the Darlingtons, Sir Charles Augustus.'

'Milverton?' John asked amazed, remembering the man whom they had met the previous day with violent dislike.

Paulina's face twisted into a similar expression.

'God, I can't stand the man – but he's a neighbour, what can I do?'

'And they've last been here - ?' Sherlock prompted.

'Saturday.'

Sherlock thanked her and then proceeded to ask Aloysius, who had so far been silently sitting on a chair in the corner, scribbling away with his notebook and Sir Anthony in his lap.

'Surely you can't think that the boy's the culprit?' Paulina intercepted in scandalised tones.

'No,' Sherlock said, bowing his head lightly, 'but children are notoriously light sleepers and endlessly curious – perfect qualifications for catching a murderer.'

Aloysius grinned in delight.

He didn't have anything new to add to what he had already told on them on the drive to Cunningham Estate, but he easily confirmed all that his aunt had said.

'Are you staying for lunch?' Paulina then asked. 'Please do. It would be a pleasure! I always cook far too much anyway.'

As he thought that this was the best way of ensuring his friend actually ate a bite or two, John readily assented.

Pauline sprang to her feet.

'Good! I'll start cooking right away.'

'Can I help you, Auntie?' Aloysius asked.

'Oh darling, you don't have to. You can keep on investigating – if it doesn't bother your new friends.'

'But I want to,' he insisted, causing his aunt to swoop down and place a tender kiss on his head.

After she had disappeared through the door, Aloysius turned back to his friends.

'I need to go and stay with Auntie Paulina. She's upset.'

'How can you tell?' Sherlock asked, interested.

'She always cooks a lot when she's upset,' the little boy explained earnestly.

Sherlock smiled approvingly.

'That's a good deduction,'

A warm glow of pleasure spread over the little boy's face, before he followed his aunt, dragging Sir Anthony and his notebook along.

'Why do you think Paulina's upset?' John pondered out loud as they made their way up the staircase to conduct their next interview. 'She didn't really care much about Kirwan.'

'She runs the house, though, doesn't she? And knows everything or as close to everything as an average person is capable of knowing of what's going on. Of course she'd be upset to discover that somebody had been murdered under her roof during the night.'

John followed his friend, thinking what a strange life he must lead, since it no longer came naturally to him that people were upset when they found a dead body lying around in one of their rooms.

_-SHSHSH-_

The first person they interviewed was Cunningham senior, a crotchety old man lounging around on the sofa in his room with the blinds drawn. He spoke with the feeble voice of a long-suffering invalid and frequently shaded his eyes with his trembling hands despite the semi-darkness that the drawn curtains already provided.

The interview dragged on for longer than the little titbits of information the old man was able to give them warranted, since they were frequently forced to repeat their questions for the benefit of their interviewee's weak ears. Basically, it boiled down to: good thing that William Kirwan was dead, the scallywag, and how dare they insinuate that he waste his precious time on this planet with such nonsense as opera!

John felt strongly tempted to ask him if he considered lying about in a half-dark room with a bad temper a better way to pass his time, and had to bite down hard on his tongue to stop himself.

The ensuing conversation with the younger son, Alex Cunningham, was hardly any more helpful. He sat in his office, all sleek, handsome, hard-working government official, grudgingly granting them a slot in his hard-fought schedule, making it blindingly obvious that his precious time should not be wasted on questions like whether he enjoyed going to the opera.

Like his sister, he hadn't heard anything during the night, though, yes, he'd been well aware that William Kirwan had the habit of breaking into their house when everybody was asleep. He had no idea why anybody would have committed two such gruesome murders and put all his hope and trust in the local police to clear them up as soon as possible.

Sherlock snorted, riled up by what he considered entirely misplaced trust, and proceeded to pose Alex several nasty questions on the trouble that he must currently be facing at the office, if he preferred to spend his working days at his home office in the country, instead of facing his angry superiors and smirking competitors in the city.

As can easily be imagined, these insinuations further damped the man's already – at best – weak interest in the conversation, leaving them with little more to learn.

They left the taciturn individual in the hope of finding out more from his smiling fiancée.

'Can you show me your purse?' Sherlock asked almost as soon as they were seated in her cosy little room.

'My purse?' Annie repeated in surprise.

'Yes,' Sherlock said smoothly. 'I could have just picked it out of your handbag - ridiculously easy, you should never walk around with those things open, not even when they're tightly clasped to your body, any expert thief would tell you that - but I deemed it more polite to ask.'

John sniggered, imagining Lestrade's face. Being the most frequent victim of the consulting detective's pilfering skills, New Scotland Yard's finest inspector could undoubtedly have told you a thing or two about Sherlock's _politeness_.

'Oh,' Annie stuttered, nervously inspecting her handbag, before she tentatively handed over her purse.

Sherlock quickly looked through the contents. Then he passed it on to John.

Inside there was a little bit of cash, not exceeding fifty pounds, backed up by credit, debit and insurance cards, a train ticket for the following week, the stub of an opera ticket – a performance of _Don Carlos _at the Royal Opera house that had taken place a fortnight ago - and a couple of photographs.

There were two shots that showed Annie in the midst of four laughing men with similar facial features, probably brothers or cousins, then, naturally, several pictures of Annie and Alex Cunningham in blissful togetherness, furthermore one photograph showing the entire Cunningham family, a separate picture of Aloysius tightly clutching Sir Anthony and finally one picture that featured a younger but still recognisable version of Annie in the midst of what must have been friends at university.

In that picture, she wore a colourful, light summer dress, looking like a merry butterfly ready to take off in flight, her smile less assured, less dazzling than the one she favoured them with now, but already full of the promise of great beauty.

Briefly, John wondered if it was just his own advanced age that prompted him to think a woman in her thirties more beautiful than a young girl of twenty or if this was objectively true.

Then something else in the picture caught his eye – a brunette girl standing right next to Annie Morrison's twenty-year-old self. She looked vaguely familiar, although he couldn't place her. With shock he realised that he must have dated way too many women in his life if all of them suddenly started to look familiar.

Giving himself a mental shake, he tuned back into the conversation, where his friend continued to confuse their poor interviewee, her dazzling smiles dimming by the second.

'Why are you here?' Sherlock asked briskly.

'How do you mean?'

The consulting detective grimaced in annoyance, as if she were being unnecessarily stupid.

'It's Monday. A typical working day, unless I am much mistaken, which – of course – is quite out of the question. You and your fiancé live in the city. He is the chief finance officer of the department of finance, I understand. Bit odd, wouldn't you agree, your stay here in the countryside?'

Annie blushed.

'Aloysius needs us. He was distraught last night,' she protested. 'It was you who told him why he's here, wasn't it? Then you really ought to understand.'

Sherlock rolled his eyes. It was obvious how little her frail excuses convinced him.

'I'm glad to hear that our government is so family-friendly orientated. So what, your fiancé gave his boss notice last night that he wasn't going to come into the office this morning because his nephew had trouble falling asleep? That must be doing wonders for his career! And yet I heard that he wanted to become the next Chancellor of the Exchequer.'

A slight crease appeared between Annie's perfectly shaped eyebrows, telling John that she would be just as intolerant of any accusations of her fiancé as he had been himself.

'Don't scoff, please!'

'Then explain this to me in a way that makes sense,' Sherlock cut harshly across her. 'I understand that _you_ intended to stay here to help Aloysius settle into his new parentless life, a decision made well before I disclosed to him why he's actually living here now. The contents of your purse attest to this fact most lavishly. You bought a train ticket back to London which is valid in a week's time. You don't have a driver's licence. The train ticket indicates that you were intending to travel back to London when your fiancé was already back in town, otherwise he could have taken you down with him in his car. So tell me: What really made him change plans?'

'It's not as though he doesn't care about his nephew!' Annie protested weakly.

'No, but his masters certainly don't care about him. So what _did_ they care about?'

The poor woman sighed. John felt sorry for her. He wished that Alex Cunningham had already revealed all this to them, so that they wouldn't have had to bother her with it in the first place. As it was, he had blocked all their questions and his fiancée now had to bear the brunt of Sherlock's inquisitiveness.

In a low voice, Annie confessed, 'Alex has the tendency to misplace his flash drives.'

'Containing sensitive data, no doubt?' Sherlock immediately probed into the matter, his nostrils quivering, reminiscent of a bloodhound that had discovered a trail.

He leaned forward in his chair and examined Alex Cunningham's fiancée with scary scrutiny.

John found himself gazing at Sherlock just as intently. Up to this moment, he hadn't fully realised just how much he had missed solving cases with his friend during the two months Sherlock had spent on the continent without him.

There was a rare, thrilling kind of beauty in Sherlock's absolute focus on the Work, in the way he x-rayed the world with his quicksilver eyes and gave it a deeper, darker meaning, like a bland snapshot that suddenly came to life when contrasts, colouring and definition were digitally reworked. Inevitably, even Annie Morrison's most radiant smiles had to pale next to it.

'Yes,' she admitted meanwhile. 'Last night he thought that one was missing and we searched for it for ages, but couldn't find it. We thought that William Kirwan might have taken it. He sometimes does that.'

'So your fiancé decided to stay here for the night and lured Kirwan back into the house to regain the flash drive and then happened to murder him?' Sherlock suggested nonchalantly.

'How can you say something like that!' Annie cried out in outrage.

'Just a suggestion,' the consulting detective replied casually. 'There is the more mundane possibility that you were waiting for the morning to go to Kirwan's house and to try to get it back. Now, however, he's dead, what a terrible misfortune, so he won't be able to tell you where he's hidden it if indeed he was the one to take it in the first place.'

'Please, Mr Holmes – Sherlock, do keep this information to yourself. Alex's superiors have been unbearably hard on him in the past months - the financial crisis - it's not his fault at all – if they were to learn of this new little mishap, it would dash all his hopes of a promotion.'

'Don't worry, I don't concern myself in politics. I couldn't care less whether he makes Chancellor of the Exchequer or not.'

Annie blinked. There were tears in her eyes.

'Please,' she said. 'He's done nothing wrong.'

'We'll see,' Sherlock replied with a demonic little grin that could hardly be described as reassuring.

The tears now freely streamed down her cheeks.

John hastily handed her a tissue.

'Let's talk of something more cheerful,' he recommended. 'I saw that you've been to the opera,' he added, nodding towards her purse.

'Oh yes,' she said, dabbing her eyes and cheeks with the tissue. 'I love going to the opera. We all do. _Don Carlos _was brilliant. I can't wait to go again. It's such good fun.'

She was prattling on at a very quick pace, anxiously steering the conversation away from any further mention of flash drives.

'We had three tickets. But then Ernest cancelled the last minute, because he doesn't really like _Don Carlos_. So we, Alex and I, that is, went with one of Ernest's friends, Victor Trevor. I think he said that he knew you at Cambridge, Mr Holmes – Sherlock, sorry, you and George Acton.'

Sherlock gave a brief start that might have been undetectable to anybody who didn't know him very well.

John, however, saw it and felt a violent stab of jealousy and curiosity as to who this person was that they would evoke such a reaction in Sherlock. It was impossible to say which emotion prevailed.

Recovering himself, Sherlock told her that they had also been to see _Don Carlos_ at the Royal Opera House, albeit three months ago. Oh really – she thought that was brilliant!

He then proceeded to ask her with great animation if she didn't think, too, that the Elisabeth had been vastly inferior to Karita Mattila's rendition of the role fifteen years ago; if it wasn't a shame that Gustavo Dudamel was talked about as the successor of Sir Simon Rattle, when his musical ripening process had been almost inexistent since his inaugural in Los Angeles; if Simon Halsey wouldn't prove an even greater loss for Berlin than his namesake Rattle and if it wouldn't have been more sensible of Daniel Barenboim to drop the piano entirely and to focus solely on his conducting.

Smiling meekly, Annie Morrison agreed with everything he said.

Thoughtfully, John watched the pair of them, names most of which meant nothing to him echoing in his ears, wondering if this was the way Sherlock might talk to Mycroft – if the brothers ever chose to have an ordinary conversation that didn't degenerate into a string of barbs and jibes.

_-SHSHSH-_

'What was all that about?' John asked as they made their way to Ernest Cunningham's room. 'Enthusing about music when there's a murderer on the loose?'

'She's hiding something, John.'

'How do you know?'

'Didn't you notice? She agreed to everything I said. I logged into her Amazon account while I was talking to her and her purchase history clearly indicates that Dudamel and Barenboim are her personal heroes; social conscience and all that.'

'Maybe she was just trying to be polite and didn't want to argue.'

'Really, John, this shows that you don't know the first thing about classical music. Enthusiasts of classical music proclaim their personal tastes and opinions with a militant arrogance that would cow any aggressively brawling football fan into submission. Just follow the classical music discussions on Amazon for a week and you'll see what I mean.'

'I'm not entirely convinced. She's a very nice girl and she obviously sensed that you wouldn't respect her opinions anyway, since you spent the entire conversation picking apart everything she said.'

'With good reason. - Honestly, John, she's too young for you,' Sherlock remarked with a superior smirk

'Thanks, that really makes me feel a lot better.'

'I don't understand why you wouldn't feel good in the first place. Obviously, you're visibly over forty, your body tells every onlooker that you spend too much time watching crap telly and nibbling on Mrs Hudson's freshly baked scones, and it's become impossible to count the number of grey hairs on your head, but otherwise you're still… well, you're tolerable, I suppose,' Sherlock ended, giving him another critical once-over.

John half-expected him to add, 'But not handsome enough to tempt me,' and promptly started sniggering.

'Don't be so juvenile, John, it's not becoming at your age.'

'Shut it, you perfectly-cheekboned git!'

'Believe me, I'd prefer not to discuss your absurd midlife-crisis symptoms - except that you're carrying them around like a garish banner, looking at every young woman as though your life were over and you'd missed out on everything. Considering general life expectancy, at least half of your life still lies ahead of you. Of course there's the 6.2 per cent chance that you will get killed during one of our cases within the next six months and due to your family history you have a five times higher risk of getting testicular cancer, though when properly treated, which given the general stupidity of the medical personnel in the Commonwealth can't be taken for granted, the probability of dying from it is less than five per cent.'

'Thank you, that was really reassuring. 6.2 per cent? Maybe I should take a break from cases,' John wondered in between chuckles.

'If you were actually dating Annie Morrison,' his friend carried on, 'the probability of dying from a stress-induced heart-attack would increase to 57 per cent. You might want to stick with me and the cases.'

John refrained from mentioning that not even Annie Morrison's dazzling smiles could match the Sherlock's various appeals, case-related and other - the git was conceited enough as it was. Therefore he merely inquired, 'What's so terrible about Annie Morrison?'  
'She's spoilt.'

'Spoilt?'

'She's the youngest in a family with four older brothers. I can't believe you missed that. She virtually exudes "little princess". Even Paulina treats her like one, although she's sensible and no-nonsense enough in general. You wouldn't live up to her expectations for ten minutes – fifteen, if you tried really hard. And you wouldn't try that hard because ultimately, you aren't that attracted to her personally. Her breasts are too small.'

'I really don't understand you. Every normal woman's breasts are somehow too small for your preferences…' John argued, thinking of poor Molly Hooper.

'I don't have any preferences in breasts, John, don't be ridiculous, I'm talking about yours, of course.'

'Mine?'

'You feel most comfortable and affectionate around women whose breast size mirrors Clara's,' his friend informed him, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world.

John stared at him.

'Hang on,' he objected, 'how do you even know what Clara's breasts look like? You've never met her.'

'There are two pictures of her in your wallet. Pictures in a wallet – nothing more revealing than that, really John! Rather obvious. One features just her, one shows Harry, you and Clara. Most of your girlfriends never made it into your wallet, but you're keeping two pictures of your estranged sister's ex-wife. Very straightforward, John. This alone emphasises her significance for you. You've known her practically all your life, you've always admired and liked her, she's your ideal of womanhood, so 34B is the size of breasts that appeals most to you. Smaller breasts leave you dissatisfied, bigger ones frighten you off. Easy.'

John gaped at him. To think that he had wasted so much time on therapy after his return to London and Ella had never picked up on this! It might have saved him a lot of trouble with his dates.

'That makes a shocking amount of sense… I'm only glad you didn't say that my expectations for my girlfriend's breasts are modelled on my mother's or on Harry's…'

He shuddered playfully, before giving further thought to the implications of what his friend had said. Come to think of it, Mary was a 34B, too, and he really liked her breasts. They were just the right size so that he could still cup them in his hands. And so responsive, too. Only the last time, when they'd –

'Thank you, John, I really didn't want to know that!' Sherlock interrupted him, sounding scandalised.

'But I didn't say anything!' John protested, blushing furiously with arousal and embarrassment.

'You were thinking it far too loudly!'

_-SHSHSH-_

Ernest Cunningham scowled all the way through his interview. Yet John received the impression that Sherlock was the recipient of slightly milder scowls, probably due to the fact that he was a Cambridge-man too.

After the first questions that now already seemed standard protocol – yes, he loved the opera; yes, he'd been aware that William Kirwan had the habit of stealing things; no, he hadn't heard anything during the night - Cambridge was once again the elder Cunningham son's topic of choice.

'I can't understand why your elder brother didn't go to Cambridge, too,' he deplored.

'Do you know Mycroft?' John asked while Sherlock sneered.

'Not personally, no. Alex sometimes meets him at the office, I understand, as they both work for the government.'

John ventured a discreet smile at his friend. He felt reasonably certain that Alex Cunningham had no idea that Mycroft Holmes wasn't a passing acquaintance who also occupied a governmental position, but the man from whose wrath he ought to hide his careless treatment of important documents the most desperately.

'Alex tells me that he's an Oxford graduate which I really fail to comprehend considering that you went to Cambridge too,' Ernest continued his lamentations.

'Oh, Mycroft will tell one man that he went to Oxford and then the next that he went to Cambridge, just as it suits him,' Sherlock quipped back. 'The truth is he went to neither.'

Ernest Cunningham stared at him.

'Yes, the truth is that Mycroft never went to university,' Sherlock disclosed with a mock-solemn face. 'He was already fifty and carrying an umbrella when he first entered this world.'

John had to bite the inside of his cheek to stop himself from bursting out laughing.

Ernest Cunningham looked incensed.

'However,' Sherlock elegantly led the conversation back to its original purpose, 'what interests me far more than my obnoxious brother's university life is your own academic career. You read English Literature, published a thoroughly dull dissertation on the swan in Yeats's poems and then proceeded to bore the world with several other boring articles on boring poems that no one ever needed - until you discovered Shakespeare's sonnets two years back and consecutively came to the literary world's attention with your fascinating new insights into those supreme expressions of poetic wit and feeling.'

John was surprised to discover that Ernest Cunningham devoted his life to reading and interpreting poems. So far, he had believed poetry to be the realm of the young, the beautiful, the consumptuous, not the playground of a moody, well-nourished man in his mid-forties.

What startled him just as much, though, was the discovery that, apparently, his flatmate didn't devote all his reading time to _An Illustrated Guide to Human Decomposition_.

'You read my work on the sonnets?' Ernest asked in awe, nearly forgetting to scowl.

'Naturally. Your reasoning on how the range of vocabulary concerning fauna, flora and domestic activities clearly illuminates that Shakespeare must indeed have been the son of a glove maker in Stratford was particularly impressive.'

'Thank you,' said Ernest.

He looked almost pleased.

Regretfully, Sherlock immediately ruined the mood again when he offered lightly, 'If you want to save yourself some elaborate research on your next article, I could simply tell you who Mr W.H. really was.'

'No, thank you,' Ernest replied coldly. 'I prefer my research.'

The atmosphere was distinctly uncomfortable now.

Fortunately, Aloysius chose that moment to burst into the room with an excited cheer, 'Lunch is ready!'

'I'm not hungry,' his uncle said moodily.

'Do come, Uncle Ernest,' the little boy insisted, 'Auntie Paulina will be very upset if you don't.'

'We're having gnocchi,' he told them and took Sherlock's hand to lead him to the dining room. 'Have you caught the murderer yet? There's asparagus, too.'

_-SHSHSH-_

As if by magic, Paulina Cunningham had produced a delicious fry-up containing gnocchi, cherry tomatoes, scallions, asparagus, parsley, gorgonzola sauce and parmesan, and John tucked in with much fervour.

The kitchen fairy enjoyed his praise and readily shared the recipe with him.

'…The trick is to add a touch of milk in case the gorgonzola isn't creamy enough…'

John thought that he might cook the dish for Mary, once he was back in London. Then he remembered that Mary didn't like Italian food.

'I'll show you how to make a good Asian fry-up with glass noodles,' Sherlock whispered into his ear.

For a brief second, John thought that Sherlock was being very sweet and that he would make the gnocchi for him instead. Then he reconsidered that the chances of Sherlock being sweet were much smaller than of him being manipulative and realised that, in all likelihood, his friend was probably trying to get him to cook the gnocchi for him.

After all, he seemed to like them well enough. His plate was almost empty, although this was partly due to the aid of Aloysius, who kept on picking pieces of asparagus from Sherlock's serving.

The first time she caught him at it, Paulina fixed her little nephew with a stern glare, but when John told her in a low voice, 'It's alright, I don't think Sherlock eats green things anyway', she dispensed with an outright scolding of his table manners.

As it was, she was kept busy enough trying to soothe her father, who went from accusing her of having cooked something that was particularly difficult to eat for a poor invalid with uncontrollably shaking hands, to moaning about the painful brightness of the living room (despite the fact that he wore a pair of sunglasses), to complaining that everybody was talking too quietly on purpose, to attacking his elder son for wasting his time with reading poetry instead of doing something sensible.

John began to suspect that whatever his sufferings, old Cunningham's biggest ailment must undoubtedly be his horrible temper.

He was glad when the meal was over and they were finally able to escape the old man's company.

They then decided to take a look at William Kirwan and Inessa McConnor's flats. The morning and an excessive lunch having left his childish enthusiasm unabated, Aloysius begged to be allowed to join them.

His presence immediately proved beneficial to them, for once they were back in the car, the first thing they noticed was the glowing orange light of the fuel gauge. The little boy knew the area like the back of his hand and quickly conducted them to the nearest petrol station.

The girl at the cash register actually giggled when Sherlock handed over his card to pay.

'I know all your movies,' she confessed breathlessly.

'Movies? What movies?' Sherlock asked, bewildered.

'Oh sorry! I… Did I confuse you?' the poor girl stuttered and blushed. 'I know your face from the papers – sorry, are you a footballer, instead?'

'Neither,' Sherlock said with as much dignity as he could muster, as though he somehow had to protect himself from being bogged down by being lumped together with footballers and movie stars. 'Sherlock Holmes. Consulting detective. Two people in this area were killed within the last fortnight. Was it you?'

The girl stared at him for a moment, then cackled shrilly.

'Oh! You're joking! Oh! Hahaha! Can I offer you a sandwich?' she offered, gesticulating towards the tiny café corner.

'No, thank you. But we'll use your internet access. Though it's exorbitantly expensive. 3 pounds an hour?'

'Oh sorry! Yes, I know. Nobody really uses our cybercafé; everybody's got their private flat rate at home these days. It's just tourists and Milverton who ever come here, so we couldn't possibly charge any less if we still want to cover our overheads.'

'Milverton?' Sherlock asked with rapid attention. 'That's interesting. Come on, John, we need to do some research.'

The consulting detective sat down at one of the computers and began downloading and printing out various files – which, as John soon discovered, were the autopsy and police reports on the two murders.

'Couldn't you have asked for them first before you hacked the local databases?' John asked, shaking his head.

'Forrester wouldn't cooperate, it's hardly my fault,' Sherlock said petulantly and mailed copies of the autopsy reports to Molly – with the request, or rather _command_ to check them for any inconsistencies.

Not having received any particular instructions himself, John thought he might as well try to call Mary. However, his call was rejected after the first ring. A second later, a text arrived:

_I told you not to call me at work._

John groaned. Mary took that damned job way too seriously for his taste. He could tell that she was extremely pissed off. All because of one innocent phone call. Now he'd have to work for ages to get back into her good books again. Blast!

Meanwhile, Sherlock hastily clicked through a great number of websites and randomly printed out some of them. John turned back to him to see if he could be of any help. After repeated inquiries, Sherlock finally deigned to inform him that he was going through Milverton's browser history.

'What do you gather from all that?' John asked. 'To me it seems that he purchased all kinds of worthless little objects on the internet that he might just as well have bought in one junk shop or other.'

'Worthless little objects? Pay attention, John! Milverton purchased flash drives, in various sizes and shapes, all tailored to his specific demands. Doesn't it strike you as unusual that he would make all his orders from here rather than from home?'

Smiling happily, Sherlock rubbed his hands.

'Oooh, this is getting so much fun!'

Aloysius, who had so far sat next to them as quiet as a mouse, pressing his finger to Sir Anthony's mouth to induce him to maintain equal silence, occasionally jotting down a word or two of John and Sherlock's conversation with a crease of concentration between his brows, now allowed himself to clap his hands enthusiastically.

'So glad you're having fun,' John said drily, 'but do try to put me in the picture now and again. Are we still planning to go to Kirwan and McConnor's flats or are we investigating Milverton now?'

'Your question is erroneous as these aren't mutually exclusive options. However, to keep it simple for your sake,' Sherlock smirked, 'yes, we're going to have a look at the two flats next.'

'Is there a possibility of walking from here?' John turned to Aloysius as he wasn't particularly keen on another drive with Sherlock.

'Why should we walk when we only just refuelled the car?' Sherlock asked before the little boy had a chance to answer.

'To be frank, I'm not climbing into a car with you unless I strictly have to,' John explained.

'Says the man who doesn't even have a driver's license,' Sherlock jeered.

'I can still drive, though,' John protested.

'What? You mean those jeep expeditions in Afghanistan that you undertook because those dumb officers were too stupid to check if you had a driver's license?'

'Come on, there was no danger of killing anybody, Sherlock, except for a couple of goats and Al Qaeda terrorists, but they needed to die anyway!'

With a puzzled frown, Sherlock asked, 'What – the goats?'

Suddenly, both of them erupted into fits of laughter. Aloysius looked from one to the other, obviously bemused, which made it all the funnier.

Once they had managed to compose themselves, they made their way back to the girl at the cash register and paid their internet expenses.

'Beware of old Cunningham,' the girl suddenly whispered when she handed Sherlock the bill. 'I don't know about those murders you're investigating, but he's a cruel man and creepy as hell. He pretends to be very ill, but I've already seen him creeping through town several times in the middle of the night.'

'Thank you,' Sherlock said pensively, 'we'll keep that in mind.'

As they walked back to the car, Sherlock's phone pinged. It was a text from Molly.

_McConnor not killed at night. Time of death more likely previous day. Traces of all-purpose cleaner on her chest-wound. Very distinctive little cavities in the blood splatter. Molly xxx_

'Molly's a rather good!' Sherlock exclaimed happily. 'Of course those idiotic policemen got it wrong when they thought that she was killed at Acton House in the middle of the night. What business did she have to go there at that time? Much more likely that she was murdered while she was cleaning there – that gives us a time of death around five o'clock. And in turn it leads to a much more interesting question: Why did Mr Acton only notice her corpse the next morning? Brilliant.'

_-SHSHSH-_

There was nothing of particular interest to be discovered in William Kirwan's flat apart from the fact that it had already been searched most thoroughly. No doubt that had been Alex Cunningham in the hope of retrieving his lost flash drive.

Their visit to Inessa McConnor's flat yielded infinitely more utilisable results. A stack of bills was lying on the sideboard next to the door. Sherlock leafed them through at lightning speed, then tapped something into his phone, whereupon he pronounced a triumphant 'Ha!' and thrust the sheets right under John's nose.

'Look – her phone calls in the last months: She frequently called the same number. And guess what – it's the number of the phone box outside there on the street corner.'

'What does that mean?' John asked.

'John, even you should be able to work that out if you consider the time of day those calls occurred.'

'Right. Late at night. Ooohhh. Really?'

'Yes,' the consulting detective confirmed his vague suspicions. 'She watched the phone box and when an eligible looking man passed, she made her call. Once the man picked up, she'd pretend that it was a mistake, they'd get chatting, she'd invite him in and in the end, he'd understand, because even average-minded idiots don't believe in that level of coincidence, and he'd leave her some money.'

'Good Lord,' John exhaled in shock. 'Shabby end of her shabby existence.'

'Why did they leave her money?' Aloysius asked innocently. 'Did she serve them tea?'

'Yeah, I think she was quite the teabaggee,' John quipped back.

Both Aloysius and Sherlock stared at him in confusion. John had expected that the little boy wouldn't grasp what he was referring to, otherwise he wouldn't have permitted himself the tempting pun. But Sherlock's lack of comprehension was both surprising and endearing. Undoubtedly, it was one of the things that his flatmate had deleted.

Sherlock tapped away on his phone. Faint colour rose to his cheeks. Apparently, he had googled the word.

Clearing his throat, he said, 'Anyway, this tells us that the victims are completely unimportant. It's all about the places where they were murdered.'

'What? How? I don't follow.'

'Maybe you'd be able to follow if your mind wasn't so firmly glued to baser matter,' Sherlock snapped back.

John sighed.

Trust his genius friend to go into a huff because John had managed once, just once to use a word that His Consulting Excellence wasn't familiar with. If John snapped at his flatmate every time the latter managed to come up with a four-syllable word that he was then obliged to look up in the Oxford English Dictionary, his lips would probably be puffy after a month.

Fortunately, living and working with Sherlock had made him immune to these contradictions. So he waited patiently for his friend to elaborate.

And Sherlock did elaborate, of course, without further prompting. After all, he could rarely resist a chance to show off and reap the praise that he never seemed to tire of.

'Use your brains, John. If you'd wanted to murder Inessa McConnor, what would you have done? We know that the killer was familiar with her habits. That much is evident from the fact that he knew the hours she worked at the Acton's. So, if he studied her habits, he would have been aware of the fact that she tended to invite men she didn't know into her flat. Now, where would it be easier to commit a crime? In broad daylight, in a house with other occupants, or at night, in a shabby little flat where the victim lived alone, a flat situated in the neighbourhood of a petrol station, where enough persons of dubious character make their appearance every night that our killer would be in no danger of standing out or being remembered?'

'That makes sense,' John said slowly.

'That was brilliant, Sherlock!' Aloysius cried out and clapped his hands enthusiastically.

The consulting detective tried very hard not to preen at the praise, but the corners of his mouth twitched nonetheless.

_-SHSHSH-_

Narrowly avoiding a couple of seemingly precious flower pots, Sherlock parked the car in the driveway of Acton House. Aloysius sprinted ahead to announce their arrival to Mr Acton, while John lagged behind to make a few teasing comments about his friend's reckless driving.

Just as John was pointing out that his lousy driver of a flatmate would probably even have succeeded at harming more than goats and terrorists in Afghanistan, Sherlock's phone starting ringing.

'Molly,' Sherlock commented with faint surprise and put the call on loudspeaker, undoubtedly expecting more information on the case that he graciously deigned to share with his friend.

However, what met him on the other end was a low, sniffling noise.

'Molly, what's the matter? Why are you crying?' he asked briskly.

'Oh Sherlock!' Molly sobbed. 'It's Greg. He …'

'Stop sniffling, Molly! What about him?'

'He isn't here!' the pathologist wailed, sounding completely unlike the shy, mousy girl John knew from Bart's lab. 'And now I think I'll never see him again! I knew he didn't really respect me! And I'll never find another date again!'

'Molly, you're not making any sense!'

'Nobody wants to date a girl who likes working with dead bodies!' Molly insisted between hysterical sobs.

'That _really_ doesn't make any sense!' Sherlock asserted with a frown.

A hysterical giggle intermingled with Molly's sobs.

'God, Sherlock, you're the first man who didn't run away screaming when I told him that I was a pathologist but said "Cool, can you show me your lab?" Normal men aren't like that.'

'I'm certain that I never used the word "cool"!' the consulting detective protested, looking scandalised.

'No, probably not,' Molly admitted and gulped. 'But that's not the point.'

'Can you finally get to the point then?'

'Greg took the day off from work today and he was supposed to come to mine for coffee, but he never turned up and he didn't phone and I tried to call him, but he didn't answer. And now I think he doesn't want to see me again because of the horror movie that we saw at the sneak – I laughed all the way through, because everything was so ridiculously artificial and plain wrong, but Greg didn't laugh, not once, and I never noticed, because I was so busy laughing my head off. And all the while he probably thought what a freak I must be, laughing at all those bloodied dead body parts and now -'

'Don't be stupid, Molly,' Sherlock cut across her. 'Clearly, you've covered several night shifts in the last days and consumed far too much coffee, but that's no excuse to work yourself up in a frenzy like a brain-amputated hamster. Lestrade hates horror movies because they remind him of the first time he discovered his wife's infidelity – with DI Gregson. It's nothing to do with you.'

'Oh!' Molly said, for a moment too surprised to sob. Recovering herself, she asked, 'But then why isn't he here now?'

'Let me see – it's Monday afternoon, in June. In all likelihood, Lestrade promised to drive his elder son and several class mates to their away netball match, but being the unorganised dolt that he is, he completely forgot about it and was only reminded of the engagement this afternoon himself. To top it all, his phone battery probably died and he never keeps the charger in his car and his funny little brain can't retain any sequence that consists of more than three numbers, so no chance of notifying you of his change in plans. He will appear at your flat in approximately 1.5 hours. Now, if I were you, I would change right out of that hideous dress –'

'How do you know what I'm wearing?'

'I can hear that you're ridiculously overdressed in your breathing pattern. The dress never suited you anyway and it's going to make Lestrade first doubly sorry, then doubly resentful for having stood you up. Also, remove the bow from your hair!'

'How do you know there's-'

'There's always a bow in your hair!' Sherlock interrupted her. 'And if you plan on throwing the cream cake with pink and silver sprinkles that you undoubtedly baked right into Lestrade's face the minute he finally walks through your door, which I recommend most heartily, do make sure that you take a video of it for John and me!'

Molly started giggling.

'Thank you, Sherlock,' she said earnestly. 'No really, thank you. I will! I will!'

And she ended the call.

Looking up from the phone screen, the consulting detective caught his flatmate giving him a funny look.

'What?' he asked, unnerved.

'Somehow I don't think Jane Austen is a good influence on you,' John replied thoughtfully. 'Maybe you should go back to _An Illustrated Guide to Human Decomposition_. Your insight into human relationships is beginning to alarm me!'

_-SHSHSH-_

Gilbert Acton was a merry old man with bright red cheeks and lewd eyes. He seemed to be a great friend of Aloysius, up-to-date on all his little research projects, including the big tadpole study. Like a duck takes to the water, he placed two glasses of juice in front of the boy, one for him, one for his teddy bear, a gesture that John found heart-warming.

'I liked watching the girl,' Mr Acton confessed in low, conspiratorial tones, when Sherlock confronted him with the fact that Inessa McConnor's murder hadn't taken place during the night but already while she was cleaning at his house in the afternoon. 'I must have fallen asleep watching her – and the next thing I know, it's morning and she's lying in the kitchen, dead.'

'Notwithstanding that this doesn't match your statement in the police report, this is preposterous. You claim to have slept close to sixteen hours, Mr Acton,' Sherlock interrupted him harshly. 'An impossible feat for a man of your age, I should think. No, let me tell you what really happened: You weren't in that afternoon, you'd driven to London to meet a young Russian woman whose acquaintance you made on a rather dubious internet site. You're looking for a cheap wife who'll take care of all your little needs, sexual, health-wise, whatever, more of a slave than a companion – alone, she wasn't what you were looking for, probably not enough of a submissive caretaker, maybe even surprised by the amount of care that you requested. Hardly astounding, considering that you made yourself appear younger and fitter in your profile. You took an early train back to Reigate – and upon entering your house, you discovered the body. – Dear Lord, it's endlessly tedious that ordinary people like yourself can never stick to the truth when interviewed during an official crime investigation!'

Gilbert Acton stared at him.

'What do you need a slave for, Mr Acton?' Aloysius asked in evident interest. 'Were you looking for a replacement for Miss McConnor?'

'Please don't tell Georgie!' Gilbert Acton cried out when his surprise gave way to horror. 'If he finds out, he'll never let me see the little ones again. He'll have me admitted. Please don't tell him.'

'I haven't spoken to him for years,' Sherlock shrugged disdainfully. 'I really don't see why I should do so now.'

'You went to university together?' John asked, remembering the scraps of information that Annie Morrison had provided him with earlier.

Before Sherlock could reply, Gilbert Acton lifted one of three large picture frames from his sideboard and handed it to John.

The photograph showed a crowd of young people picnicking on the very hill-top that they had stood on the previous evening, admiring the view into the valley and the rainbows hovering over it. In the centre of the group there was a young man whom John immediately identified as George Acton. The family resemblance was undeniable. Equally undeniable was the fact that the young man was clearly one of the bullies like Sebastian Wilkes that had made Sherlock's university life hell.

What drew his attention, however, were two young men sitting a little apart. One of them was strikingly handsome, with a warm, friendly face, his arm placed protectively around the other, a skinny, pale boy with messy dark curls. It was very much Sherlock. And yet he didn't look like Sherlock at all. For this younger version of the Sherlock that John knew was looking at the boy who was hugging him with an open, honest smile that John had rarely ever seen on his friend's face.

And suddenly, with the certainty of an intense stab of jealousy, John knew that the other boy must be the mysterious Victor Trevor.

If Sherlock saw any of the emotions flitting across John's face, which he probably did, he never commented on it. He only spared an indifferent glance for the picture and started drilling Gilbert Acton with questions concerning the murder.

Acton House was nowhere near as spacious as the Cunningham Estate and Mr Acton, living there on his own, led a somewhat more secluded life than his livelier neighbours. Still, some of the neighbours regularly came to see him, the Cunninghams, of course, especially his little favourite Aloysius, then the Hills, the Darlingtons and Milverton. Georgie and the little ones only dropped by twice a year, what a shame!

In the days leading up to the murder nothing unusual had occurred, no strange visits, nothing. The only unusual thing had been that blasted Lyudmila, who'd been so different to her promising profile. Was she connected to the murders? She'd seemed a little fishy. He really hoped not, for then they'd need him as a witness, right, and then George would know, after all, dear God!

Sherlock rolled his eyes.

'Not everything in the world is somehow connected to your lively procreative instincts,' he stated coldly. 'Did you notice if anything in the house was missing after the murder?'

'Things are missing all the time,' Gilbert Acton complained. 'That girl, my, she was a sexy devil, but she was always cleaning things up and I never knew where anything was afterwards. I don't own that many little artefacts, as you can see, pictures, trinkets, candles and whatever it is that the ladies use to decorate their rooms, so it was just a book that I left lying on the table or my spare pair of glasses, and still she would store them away somewhere and I wouldn't know where she'd put them.'

'Yes, but was any particular item missing when you came back to your house on the morning after the murder?'

'There she was lying on the floor. For a while I was too shocked to think of anything else. But then I noticed that my camera wasn't on the table where I'd seen it last. It's a beauty of a camera – cost me two thousand quid. You know the one that we took all those wonderful ladybird pictures with, Aloysius. The digital single-lens reflex system is amazing. And it offers space for two memory cards and two batteries. It was perfect when I took a longer trip to Greenland to photograph the glaciers. The pictures came off really well, even if I say so myself. Do you want to see them?' he asked, already getting up from the sofa.

'Sit down and get back to the day of the murder, would you?' Sherlock said impatiently.

Frowning slightly, Gilbert Acton obeyed.

'Where was I? Ah yes, it was gone. Well, not where I thought it had been. I panicked that the murderer might have stolen it – and when the police arrived, I reported the theft, too, but then they discovered it in the top drawer over there. The damn girl, bless her, must have put it there in her general cleaning spree and all my panic was for nothing.'

'How convenient,' Sherlock said drily and bolted out of the room, clearly having learnt all there was to learn. John nodded politely towards Mr Acton and followed his friend. Aloysius hopped after them.

Outside they met Milverton, well-tanned, muscular and unlikeable as he'd been during the previous day. To John's surprise, Sherlock arranged an interview with the man on the following day to hear his thoughts on the murders.

'We've spent the entire day interrogating all these blockheads. But I'd wager that you could tell us certain details concerning these murders that all of those blind little moles missed.'

'Hahaha – that's a safe bet!' Milverton boomed, sounding disgustingly pleased with himself and entered the house.

They heard him greet Gilbert Acton, then there was a 'Mind if I smoke?' and a subsequent banging of cupboard drawers in search of an ashtray.

'Smoking can kill you,' Aloysius informed them.

Doctor John Watson beamed.

'Very good. Keep that in mind when you grow up.'

'Auntie Paulina says that only wicked men smoke. And I don't want to be wicked. Mr Milverton is a very wicked man, I think. Sir Anthony thinks so too.'

'Quite so,' John agreed.

Sherlock pouted.

'I'm not wicked.'

'Well, you don't smoke, do you?'

'How could I when you're always hiding my cigarettes?'

'Why can't you just be grateful that I've ensured that those wicked days are well behind you?' John teased him.

'You're not wicked, Sherlock,' Aloysius voiced his own opinion on the matter, 'you don't need to smoke.'

Sherlock groaned.

_-SHSHSH-_

Once they had taken leave of Aloysius and were back at their host's house, they sat down for a meagre meal that made John bless Paulina Cunningham for having feasted them so amply for lunch.

Colonel Hayter entertained them with stories on how cleverly he'd managed to trick two customers at the garage, selling them certain replacement parts at an exorbitantly high price.

In return, Sherlock wasted no time to inform him how truly stupid it was to brag about this in front of them, when they might easily relay everything that he'd said to the local police.

They took the rest of the dinner in silence. Afterwards, their host quickly disappeared to his room with a tight-lipped 'Goodnight.'

When they were back in their room, sitting side by side on the double-bed, Sherlock flicking through the police and autopsy reports that he'd printed out earlier, John taking down some notes on the various pieces of information and clues that they had uncovered during the day, John suddenly received a phone call from Mary.

'You've made it on to YouTube, John,' she greeted him in between giggles and John felt that he'd been forgiven for his earlier attempts to distract her from work.

'What?' he asked, flabbergasted.

In the background, he could hear himself say, '_There was no danger of killing anybody, Sherlock, except for a couple of goats and Al Qaeda terrorists, but they needed to die anyway!'_

And Sherlock's reply, _'What – the goats?'_

Apparently, the girl in the petrol station had filmed them during their internet research and shared the video on the web. Great. Didn't they even have any privacy left – not even in a quaint little town well outside London?

'You two are so sweet together. But do be careful that you don't become the target of militant vegetarians, honey,' Mary tittered. Then she sighed. 'No, no, no, darling, calm down, be a dear!'

'Sorry what?' John asked.

'Oh, I wasn't talking to you, I was talking to my printer.'

'You call your printer darling?'

'He keeps on wanting attention, he's so delicate, and when he feels that I'm ignoring him, he causes a paper jam to spite me. If I scold him, he'll never do what I want him to, so I just have to pamper and to coax him. Lovingly.'

'I see. No, actually, I don't. Never mind – Hang on – printer? Does that mean you're still at the office? I thought that you were going to go to the cinema tonight?'

'So you do listen to me occasionally,' Mary teased. 'Anthea cancelled. She's needed desperately at the office, national crisis or something like that. Anyway, Melissa's already seen the movie and she thought that it was pretty unoriginal, not even fulfilling the Bechdel test criteria, so I don't think I missed out on much.'

'But instead of just going home and relaxing, you decided to heap up some more hours of overtime?'

'Oh John, we're developing a delightful new series of swap option packages, it's so exciting!'

'I have no idea what you're talking about, but don't worry, I'm perfectly used to that.'  
Mary laughed.

'There's a good boy.'

'Yeah – what?'

'Oh sorry, I was just talking to the printer again. He finally recognised that I removed all traces of a paper jam.'

'Right.'

'So you're back working on a case now, are you? That sounds like so much fun.'

'Yeah, it is. Mostly. We spent the whole day talking to people and the git who's sitting next to me refused to let me in on what any of it meant, as usual.'

'I don't do that!' Sherlock protested next to him. 'I just thought that even your average brain would pick up on the obviousness of it all.'

'Thanks – it didn't.'

'Then all the fresh country air doesn't do you any good, John – we should really think about returning to London immediately!'

'Oh shut up! – Sorry, Mary, I didn't mean you, of course.'

'That's perfectly alright, honey. Tell Sherlock I want you back for Christmas, though.'

'Tell Mary that if she honestly thinks I'll need six months to solve this petty little puzzle I'll never speak to her again,' Sherlock intercepted in insulted tones.

'How did you…' John began. 'Oh never mind!'

'Tell Sherlock that I think him very sweet!' Mary said.

'Tell Mary that I think her very horrible.'

'No, you don't,' John contradicted him. 'He doesn't,' he repeated for Mary's benefit, 'don't mind him.'

'I wouldn't dream of it.'

Somehow, the word 'dream' triggered John's earlier memory turned fantasy of that one perfect time that they had ended up having sex on the stairs leading up to Mary's bedroom.

Thinking of that time alone, of Mary's soft, peachy breasts, turned him on again and he was quite desperate to share this with his girlfriend, when Sherlock, deducing exactly where John's thoughts had strayed, turned a page of his police report with the flaming kind of disapproval that John would previously have supposed impossible in that simple act.

Needless to say, this was enough to nip any arousal in the bud.

'Sorry, what did you say?' he asked, having been too distracted to listen.

'I said I'm beginning to miss you.'

'Are you talking to your printer again?'

'No.'

'Oh.'

His mind went curiously blank. He didn't know what else to say.

There was a short pause. Then Mary spoke again.

'Thank you.'

He understood that she was grateful he hadn't lied, hastily saying back how he missed her when it wasn't even remotely true, because he was enjoying the case far too much to miss anything or anybody else. What he couldn't decide, though, was if she'd been sincere or if it had all been a test of his honesty.

Confused, feeling that he might think more clearly in the morning, he rejoined, 'Well, it's been a long day, so I'll call it a night, if that's alright with you.'

'That's perfectly fine, honey. Enjoy your rest. God knows when you'll get the chance to sleep again. Tell Sherlock I said hi.'

'Sherlock says hi, too.'

'No, I didn't!' Sherlock protested.

'Actually, I think that's exactly what you were trying to say earlier,' John smirked.

'Of course not, what a preposterous idea!'

'Goodnight John! Goodnight Sherlock! Try to get a little bit of sleep in the midst of all your bickering!' Mary said and ended the call.

_-SHSHSH-_

It was a loud thud that woke him.

For a second, John felt disoriented as to where he was and what had caused the noise. Then he established that he was staying at Colonel Hayter's in Reigate and that the noise which had woken him must have been caused by the chair banging against their door in answer to someone trying to press down the handle from the outside.

For Sherlock had once again barred the door with a chair, a construction that worried John for various reasons. The most obvious explanations that he could think of were either that Sherlock suspected their host to be the murderer they were trying to catch or that Sherlock was still suffering from some form of post-traumatic stress-disorder as a result of the months he had spent bringing down Moriarty's network.

He'd never paid any attention to whether Sherlock wasted peculiar care on securing his door at 221B when he went to sleep at night, so he couldn't be sure. Anyway, neither explanation was particularly enticing.

And now someone, possibly their potentially murderous host, was trying to break into their room.

'Sherlock – what –'

'Go back to sleep, John,' came his friend's calm, deep voice from the other side of the bed.

John turned around to find Sherlock propped up against the headboard, perusing the police reports over the faint light of his bedside lamp.

The sight annoyed him so profoundly that he completely forgot what had woken and puzzled him in the first place.

'Sherlock, what the hell do you think you're doing?' he exploded. 'We had a deal – you get to work on the case if you eat and sleep and rest whenever necessary! I go out of my way to ensure that you get well and you're not even willing to take a single step towards me! If you're not going to listen to me, I'll just have to – to - '

'What? Send me home in disgrace? Don't be ridiculous, John.'

'I'm not ridiculous, I'm just – disappointed.'

The moment he said it, he realised that he was beginning to sound like his mother.

Sherlock sighed dramatically.

'You're taking this parental lark way too seriously. Mary can't be a good influence on you.'

John felt the corners of his mouth tug upwards despite himself.

'Shut up and go to sleep!' he ordered a little more mildly and took the papers from his friend's hand, wrestled him back down onto the mattress and bent over him to turn off the little light so as to make sure that his orders were actually followed this time.

'Ouch!' he groaned when he impaled the tender flesh of his lower stomach on the sharp elbow of his friend. 'Why do you have to be all sharp bones? I really need to feed you up.'

'And I need to ration your mealtimes. God, John, you're squashing me! Get off!'

Once they were safely posited next to each other again, John recalled the thud against the door, but Sherlock brushed off all his inquiries with a vague, 'We'll talk about it in the morning. Weren't you the one who's so avid on sleeping?'

John would have preferred to investigate the incident right there and then, but when Sherlock was set on being mysterious, there was no persuading him to talk. And he _was_ too fagged out to pursue the matter. Also, come to think of it, there might be the simple explanation that Sherlock had deduced at first sight that Colonel Hayter was a notorious sleep walker. And in case of actual danger, he still had his gun right beside him on the night table, after all.

So he dropped the subject and asked his friend for another Jane Austen story. This time Sherlock chose _Sanditon_ and expounded on how there was an ample supply of clues in the fragment that the author had left to deduce exactly how the novel would end. Unfortunately, John fell back asleep before he had a chance of finding out what ultimately happened to Sir Edward Denham.


	4. Chapter 4

Here's the new chapter, most of which poor John spends being jealous, but then they kiss and make up. Well not quite. But the equivalent of it in their weird world. :)

A big thank you to my lovely beta **Ivory Winter** who was once again full of useful suggestions and generally invaluable!

I can't say when the next chapter will be published as I'm currently struggling a lot with this story. When I started writing this, I had a lot of fun toying round with certain ideas, but right now all of that is gone, to be honest. The experiment with the long chapters has been a spectacular failure. If I ever write another multi-chapter story, I will write most (if not all) of it before I start publishing and I will choose shorter chapters again. I've learned my lesson, I think. I don't have a lot of time for writing anyway and it takes far too long to get back into the chapters every time when they're this long, which means that I get hardly anything done and am left all frustrated. Obviously, I'm not going to let anybody down who had the kindness to subscribe to this story, so I will definitely finish it. But I won't deny that it's quite difficult at the present. Given that I don't really derive any pleasure from it myself at this point, any kind of feedback would be all the more appreciated to keep me going.

I hope that my struggles aren't too visible and that you'll still find something to enjoy. Thank you for reading.

* * *

**Chapter 4**

Any remaining concerns John might have felt regarding his friend's fragile state of health had vanished by the next morning.

If Sherlock had mainly demonstrated his new-found vigour the previous day by snubbing and embarrassing everybody else, he now seemed determined to put John's nose out of joint too.

In the cosy half-darkness of their room last night, sitting on the bed next to the silent genius, talking to Mary, John had laughed away his anger at being left out. With the warm rays of the morning sun bathing the parterre breakfast room at Cunningham Estate in fresh, sober light, his tolerance of his friend's secrecy waned considerably.

They didn't talk about the curious disturbance during the night. Of course not. John felt somewhat bovine for ever having expected it.

They didn't talk about anything else either. Evidently, the consulting detective was too busy thinking and protecting his trademark air of mystery. However, that John was displaying unnecessary levels of stupidity for being unable to puzzle everything together himself was implied with little subtlety.

Living and working with Sherlock had taught John that the degree of cooperation his flatmate showed was a faithful indicator of his physical and emotional well-being. The deeper he was immersed in a case the more his willingness to share his thought processes dwindled – and the happier he was, his brilliant mind for once working to full capacity.

This withholding silence that Sherlock wrapped himself in like a second cool, mystical coat was a silence that throbbed with superiority and the promise that in the end, it would erupt into a triumphant stream of deductions. There was no feeling of absence to it.

In this, it differed from the more heartbroken type of silence that reigned in 221B when Sherlock struggled with bouts of depression – dead, echoless nothingness that crawled through the living room and clung to the curtains like the pungent smells of Sherlock's more disgusting experiments.

It was the first kind of silence that enveloped Sherlock now. Since waking up a couple of hours ago, he hadn't filled John in on anything that he'd observed during their interviews the previous day. Instead, he was typing away on his phone or making annotations in his little notebook, occasionally frowning or blinking in that sensational, attention-commanding way of his, as if he were intent on further whetting John's appetite for the information he so ardently refused to give him.

Witnessing that his friend was entirely back to his obnoxious self, John could have rejoiced with the realisation that his friend's health had been quite sufficiently restored, had he not been so thoroughly annoyed by it.

So much so that by the time Aloysius told them, 'Last evening Mr Milverton came here. His face was dark red and he was shouting when he clattered up the stairs and then he was in Uncle Alex's office and shouted some more! It was scary. He's a very wicked man, isn't he?' John felt seriously inclined to strangle the detective who whistled happily at this new piece of information.

'What?' he asked irritably while the hands in his pockets curled into fists of their own accord.

'John – just think!'

'I'm trying, Sherlock – but please remember that I'm not a consulting know-it-all like you. Besides, I'm quite out of practice when it comes to casework, since you didn't take me with you on your last big case.'

For the first time, Sherlock actually raised his face to look at his friend, a perplexed little crease between his eyebrows.

'Why would I have taken you with me, John?' he asked, sounding genuinely surprised. 'You wouldn't have been of any use to me there. You would have slowed me down. You speak hardly any French, no German, no Italian, I would have spent ages translating everything for you and the case would have dragged on for four months instead of two.'

Having stated that, he returned to whatever it was that awaited him on his smartphone and laid a significantly higher claim to his attention than his friend's dull complaints.

'Right,' John said tightly and nodded.

It made sense. He couldn't deny that. But it hurt, all the same.

Unbidden, the image of the mysterious Victor Trevor resurfaced in his mind – the handsome and intelligent face that Sherlock had contemplated with such a fond smile, the arm clad in an exquisite and presumably costly material that was wrapped amicably around Sherlock's shoulders. Undoubtedly, _he_ knew several languages like his mother tongue, probably even both of the dead and the living variety.

Would Sherlock have let _him _come along to Europe, bouncing ideas off him in French, perhaps? Would Sherlock, with that open little smile, have constantly given _him_ access to the beautiful prism of his sharp mind, tongue and eyes that filtered reality and refracted it into all the shades of the rainbow, flooding the world with colour and sound?

Hastily, John shook his head as if to clear it.

He was being ridiculous. After all, as far as he knew, he was the only person Sherlock had ever accepted as a partner in crime, even if he didn't share everything with him all the time. Which was fine, right? Most of the time, at least. But then again, until yesterday he'd also thought that he'd been the first intimate friend Sherlock had ever made. Well.

The rational part of his mind told him that he was overreacting to the discovery of not having a life-long monopoly on Sherlock's affections: _You know what his mind works like, don't you? He needs the darkness so that he can eventually let his light shine all the more brightly. He would have shut out the wonderful Mr Trevor too._

However, there was also another whisper at the back of his mind, faint but sickeningly persuasive: _Maybe you're simply inadequate, John._

He felt someone tug at his sleeve and looked up to find Aloysius standing next to him with a very earnest look in his wide child's eyes.

'You look sad, John,' the little boy said. 'Do you want to hold Sir Anthony?'

A startled little laugh escaped John's throat, thrashing painfully against his palate. His mouth felt curiously dry. He swallowed forcefully.

'No, I'm fine,' he said, shaking his head.

'It's alright to be sad,' Aloysius told him with a far too wise expression for his young age. 'That's what Auntie Paulina told me, too, when I cried last night. I was thinking of Mummy.'

John felt his eyes well up.

'Come here,' he mumbled and enveloped the child in a tight hug.

It was impossible to say who was comforting whom.

Sherlock was lost too deeply in his thoughts to take any notice of them.

_-SHSHSH-_

All of a sudden, the sound of shouting in the entrance hall roused them.

Rushing there, John discovered Paulina carrying several Sainsbury bags. She was trying, clearly in vain, to persuade her brother Ernest to come down and help her. Glad to be of use, John offered his assistance.

'Oh that's great, thank you! There's still five bags in the boot of the car. No, Aloysius, darling, they're too heavy for you – you can help me unpack them in the kitchen if you want to. Do you want to stay for lunch, John? I can't imagine that Hayter's offering you anything decent to eat.'

Thinking of their meagre breakfast in the morning, where they'd tried – with little success – to find scraps of eatables in the kitchen because their host had already left by the time they woke, John readily assented and went to fetch the remaining bags from Paulina's car.

In the kitchen, Aloysius and Paulina were busy unpacking the groceries, a sight that made John smile involuntarily as he deposited his bags on the table.

'Why are you smiling?' Paulina asked him.

'It's just. Well. Big house and all that,' John tried to explain himself. 'My girlfriend makes me watch a lot of period dramas. There's always a whole bunch of servants bustling about, doing everything of importance. And here you are, the mistress of this estate, doing the shopping.'

Paulina laughed, handing her little nephew an apple and arranging the rest of the fruit that she'd bought in a large glass bowl.

'We're not in Downton Abbey, Doctor Watson – Aloysius, darling, you need to wash it first – There's all kinds of help, obviously, but no such thing as servants nowadays. Besides, I've got two hands and nothing else to do with them, anyway. '

He chuckled.

At that moment, Sherlock finally arrived in the kitchen and positioned himself in the centre of the room so that he stood in everybody's way. Briefly, John wondered if Sherlock had only just noticed their absence, resurfacing from the depths of his mind palace, or if the lazy sod had simply waited until all the chores had already been done without his input.

Be that as it might, he immediately launched into questioning Paulina on Milverton's visit the previous evening.

'He went up to Alex's office,' she recounted, 'didn't even say hello first. Aloysius met him in the corridor. You said that he was already livid when he came, didn't you, darling? Then he clomped back downstairs, making quite the racket. Mostly, he complained that Alex wasn't there. Alex drove back to the city in the afternoon, you see.'

'So he recovered his flash drive, then?' Sherlock inquired.

'Flash drive? I'm not sure what you're talking about. I just know that Alex was looking for something. It might have been a flash drive, they didn't tell me. Alex thought Kirwan took whatever it was that he was missing.'

'So he searched Kirwan's flat?'

'Yes, he and Ernest went there directly after lunch and when they came back, he drove straight on to the city. So I suppose he found whatever it was.'

Sherlock nodded thoughtfully and directed the conversation back to Milverton.

'Milverton was furious, saying he'd arranged a meeting with Alex,' Paulina explained. 'Annie tried to talk to him, but he reduced her right to tears. It was dreadful. I really wanted to throw him out once and for all. What a shame that he's a neighbour and that our families have been friends for the last thirteen generations! I've never seen him in such a ghastly temper. Not that he's ever been particularly nice.'

Sherlock smiled thinly. 'I'd imagine not.'

'Are you talking about Milverton?' a deep female voice boomed from the entrance of the kitchen. 'He's horrible, that man. I hope he burns in hell for all eternity. Ruined one of my former employers, poor man, he didn't deserve that.'

The voice belonged to a stout woman of about fifty.

'Maria! So good you're here. Do you want a cup of coffee? This is Maria, our cleaner. She only returned from her holiday in Italy last night, so there's no need for you to drill her with questions,' Paulina added for her guests' benefit. Turning back to the newly arrived, she continued, 'The upstairs offices and bedrooms need to be done today, I think, and the entrance hall. You've heard of the murder, haven't you? There's not a lot of blood, I wouldn't ask that of you, but there's wax on the marble tiles – do you think you can do something about that?'

'No problem, I'll start with that,' Maria agreed resolutely. 'I read about it in the paper this morning. They said he was killed the same way Inessa McConnor was. Dreadful to think that there's a serial killer lurking around here like some kind of crusader. I've started saying my prayers again every night. I really hope Forrester catches him soon.'

'I highly doubt that, but don't worry, we're investigating the case,' Sherlock told her.

She squinted at him. Then suddenly, her face lit up in recognition.

'Oh you're Sherlock Holmes, the famous detective! I didn't recognise you without the hat! Wow! It's like meeting a celebrity!'

Sherlock scowled at the mention of the ominous hat. John giggled.

Once he'd recovered his dignity, the hatless detective asked coolly, 'Out of the inhabitants of this house, who do you think murdered William Kirwan?'

In shock, Maria dropped the cup of coffee that Paulina had just handed her.

John made a mental note to inform his friend that this wasn't the sort of question one should spring on unsuspecting people who held a breakable and possibly scalding hot object in their hands.

'Why one of us?' Paulina asked in a strained voice, sweeping up the shards of the cup while Maria wiped up the spilt coffee. 'Didn't you say that Kirwan's murder was connected to Inessa's?'

'Technically, the killer could be a third-party who lives neither at this house nor at the Acton's, but while Inessa McConnor's murder occurred during the afternoon, at a time when she was working there and Mr Acton was away, making it easy for the killer to just walk in, the murder of Kirwan took place in this house in the middle of the night. There were no signs of a break-in. Unless several people apart from William Kirwan also possess a key that allows them to enter the grounds and the house at any given time, the most probable solution is that Kirwan's killer was waiting for him within this house.'

Paulina stared at him.

'Right,' she said slowly as she put away her hand brush and dustpan. 'I hope you're wrong. In fact,' she added, an annoyed expression flitting over her face as though she wanted to say, _Really, couldn't you just ask that straight away, _'we do keep a spare key on the saucer of the flower pot of the oxeye daisy on the porch which all of our neighbours know about.'

Sherlock eyed her shrewdly. 'You didn't mention this before.'

'You didn't ask.'

'Do you suspect one of your neighbours, then?'

'Milverton's capable of anything,' Maria muttered, whereas Paulina answered carefully, 'I suspect neither a member of this family nor of this neighbourhood of murder. I sincerely hope that a different solution will present itself. But – well – whatever the solution –do clear this up as fast as possible.'

In an almost military fashion Sherlock bowed his head at her, as if to say: Command accepted. Then he swept out of the kitchen, followed by John and little Aloysius.

'I'll call you when lunch is ready,' Paulina shouted after them.

'What's going on, Sherlock?' John asked angrily. 'You're lucky that Paulina takes everything you throw at her in her stride. Anyone else would've kicked us out of the house for good. And what was –'

However, Sherlock wasn't listening to him. Instead he crouched down in front of the oxeye daisy on the porch and all but buried his nose in the plant.

'Ah,' he breathed out almost lovingly.

John squatted down next to him and tried to determine what had caught his friend's attention. Like Paulina had said, there was a little key lying on the saucer of the flower pot. Like the rest of the saucer, it was covered by yellow pollen. – No, he corrected himself, his eyes widening suddenly with the discovery. The yellow layer on the key was less pronounced!

'Someone took the key! For several hours at least!' he said excitedly.

Sherlock turned to face him, almost bumping their noses together. They were so very close. It was quite unsettling.

Contrary to what the majority of the British population believed, he did not spend most of his time in that proximity of Sherlock's face, thank you very much. Up this close, it was the face of a stranger, a fragile mosaic where time had washed away several small pieces of stone and most of the colour, too, making it impossible for John to read his expression.

Suddenly, something shifted in the cryptic composition and the features re-arranged themselves into something else entirely, something uncannily familiar, something that transformed all of John's anger and frustration into a desperate desire to move even closer and to bury himself somewhere beneath the delicate white skin right in front of him.

He swallowed and leant back a little.

'Are we going to run it for fingerprints?'

'My fingerprints are on it too,' Aloysius protested behind them, making John jump. He'd quite forgotten that they weren't alone. 'And I've done nothing wrong.'

'There are all kinds of little scratches on the surface of the key. So clearly it's in frequent use. There'll be too many fingerprints to give us any useful data,' Sherlock agreed and slowly raised himself to his feet.

'Are we going to interview the Hills and the Darlingtons then?'

'No, we're going to pay a visit to Milverton as arranged,' the consulting detective announced and marched back into the house.

Once they were back in the sun-lit drawing room, John felt his previous anger return and made a new attempt to extract information from his mysterious friend, 'How does Milverton come into all this?'

Sherlock groaned disdainfully.

But at least he answered, rather than burying himself in his smartphone and pocket book. Thank God for small mercies.

'I told you yesterday, didn't I, that the murders aren't about the victims, but about the houses.'

'Yes, but what does that mean? Do you think that the murderer was trying to steal something and McConnor and Kirwan intercepted him and were therefore murdered?'

'John, try to think. We know that the killer is a local who was familiar with the schedules of both Kirwan and McConnor. Surely if he'd been trying to steal something without being caught, he could easily have selected a time for his operation when he would have been entirely undisturbed.'

'Ah, I see. No, I don't. What is it that you're saying?'

'As you remarked yourself when you were examining Kirwan's body yesterday, these murders were no accident. They were the work of a professional.'

John scratched his head.

'I still don't get it. You're saying that the killer didn't want to kill them but he killed them deliberately? That doesn't make sense.'

'Try to broaden your perspective, John. Think of it this way: There is something in this house that you need to steal. Something very valuable. So valuable that it would be fatal if someone immediately noticed that it was gone. What do you do?'

'Well, I'd try to disguise that I'd taken it. Maybe leave something that looks similar in the same place.'

'Good, John, classic strategy. Now imagine that someone thinks he's above all that. That he can think of a far better way of disguising his secret theft.'

'Christ!' John cried out, looking horrified. 'Are you saying that the person who stole whatever it was killed McConnor and Kirwan to distract from what he'd done? A murder to disguise theft? Killing innocent people for some valuable item or other? That's sick!'

'Can you imagine anyone else working for Mycroft?' Sherlock asked with a shrug.

'No, I suppose not,' John said slowly, still shaking his head in disgust.

'What did he take, Sherlock?' Aloysius wanted to know. 'Auntie Paulina's jewellery is still here. And the pictures. And the vases. And my microscope.'

Sherlock rolled his eyes. 'The secret service holds no interest in your private riches. He would have been looking for information. Top-secret information.'

'Uncle Alex has lots of secret files,' Aloysius told them with childlike gullibility. 'He leaves them lying about. Then his bosses are angry and Auntie Annie cries.'

Things were starting to make sense to John. Vague ideas and suspicions began to take a more concrete shape. Due to his position in the ministry of finance, Alex Cunningham would be in possession of top-secret government documents.

Sherlock's words echoed through his head, _He collects information. Valuable information. _He was starting to see how Sir Charles Augustus Milverton might come into all of this.

_-SHSHSH-_

Lunch didn't pass without an éclat. Apparently, Sherlock had already emptied his cornucopia of patience when he'd explained some of his thoughts on the murders to John.

So, when old Cunningham complained, after the obligatory dig at his elder son for spending his time in the countryside reading poetry while Alex was back in the city doing something useful, that the meal his daughter had prepared wasn't compatible with his trembling hands, Sherlock rudely interrupted him, 'Your hands seem steady enough when they're holding poker cards.'

Acute silence fell on the table, varying from awkward to shocked.

Soundlessly, Paulina's lips repeated the word 'Poker.' She looked as if she sincerely regretted that she had only just done the cooking.

Annie Morrison's face was a picture of violent dismay.

Aloysius looked from one adult to the other, his eyes round and puzzled.

Cunningham senior was the first to recover.

'How dare you insinuate – Are you now inviting guests for lunch exclusively to insult me?' he rounded on his daughter.

The veins on his forehead stood out in dark, livid purple.

'Yes,' Paulina said briskly, meeting his furious glare with a resolute stare of her own.

The old man was the first to avert his eyes.

Swallowing hard, Paulina turned to Sherlock, 'Go on. Tell me more about the poker.'

'Granddad sneaks round town at night!' Aloysius piped up. 'The lady in the petrol station told us.'

'_What_?' his aunt asked, cringing involuntarily, then shrugged as though she were trying to shrug off this new revelation. 'I need a drink. Fetch the vodka, Annie, will you?'

Dutifully, Annie went to fetch the vodka bottle, pouring both her future sister-in-law and herself a glass with slightly trembling hands.

'Is that water? Can I have a drink, too?' Aloysius inquired earnestly.

'No, you're too young,' John whispered to him. 'Believe a doctor.'

The little boy nodded thoughtfully.

Meanwhile, old Cunningham's hands were shaking in an uncontrolled, erratic fashion that differed strikingly from their former displays of decrepitude. The doctor in John thought that he might actually be in need of a drink, too.

After downing two shots, Paulina turned calmly back to Sherlock and said, 'Explain.'

'Paulina,' her father interfered in a tearful voice. She held up a hand.

'Not now,' she said strictly. Her eyes never left the consulting detective.

With a smug smile, Sherlock launched into his explanation.

'Once you started university, two things happened: Your father retired and your mother died. Without a job and without a companion at his side, he dreaded a life of loneliness and decided that he couldn't do without you. Being the backward blockhead that he is, he refused to even consider the option that one of his sons might stay with him of his own free will. No, nothing beyond a top job in the government would satisfy them for him. And as your sister was already engaged at the time, it had to be you.

'But since he realised that you probably wouldn't be all too willing to drop your studies and return to your ancestral home, playing housekeeper for the rest of your life, he attempted to pose as an invalid. He banked on your daughterly compassion which would make you choose his well-fare over any plans that you had for a life of your own. Quite successfully – you've fallen for it these last twenty years.

'However, as you can imagine, lying around all day in his darkened room wasn't a very fulfilling way of spending his time for a man in full possession of his physical force. So your father developed the habit of stealing out of the house once everybody else was asleep, meeting up with a couple of other men in secret to enjoy a couple of games of half-legal poker.

'One of his poker associates is his doctor, who's probably up to his ears in debt and therefore readily feeds you false reports on your father's state of health to at least pay off the interest. My educated guess is that the last time your father indulged in his little hobby was on Saturday and Sunday night. Given that none of you knew of his pursuits, there's clearly no one to back up his statement of when he left the house and when he returned on Sunday night. You've made yourself a prime murder suspect, Mr Cunningham, well done.'

Annie gasped. Ernest scowled in disgust. Paulina stared incredulously at her father.

'Is this true?' she asked slowly.

The entire body of the old man shook, his proud, lordly behaviour giving way to profound misery.

'Paulina – darling,' he sobbed, the tears spilling freely down his wretched old face. 'Don't –'

Sternly, she defied him, 'You might have said something. We would have found a solution.'

'And – and,' he stuttered in between fresh tears, 'and now? If I say – say something now?'

'I don't know,' she replied, all austere honesty, 'maybe.'

After a short pause, she added, 'Right now I don't want to see you. I need some fresh air. I'm going for a walk. Are you coming, Annie?'

Annie startled up as though her future sister-in-law's asperity scared her. Like a frightened little animal that had never heard its master raise his voice before, she scurried away to fetch her coat and bag.

'Clear up the table, will you?' Pauline meanwhile instructed her brother. 'And remember not to remove the wrapper from the tabs – it's water-soluble.'

Turning to her guests, she continued, inclining her head, 'I'm sorry – but do excuse me. And Sherlock –' The consulting detective looked at her with a mildly apprehensive expression but all that followed was '– _thank you_.'

With that she was gone.

As soon as John had hoovered up the remainders of his meal which looked too tempting to leave untouched, no matter how bleak the mood around the lunch table, the pair of detectives left old Cunningham to his misery and his son to his incessant scowling.

Indecisively, little Aloysius lingered in the doorway, staring at the crying form of his grandfather, before he quietly followed his two friends.

_-SHSHSH-_

Outside, the sun was shining brightly, making the fresh green meadows glisten, illuminating hills and valleys with its warm, piercing glow. It made for a nice change to the drab oak-panelled lunch room and its equally sombre inhabitants. The lazy clitter of crickets and the jaunty chirping of birds that accompanied the curious detective trio on their walk to Milverton's estate further dispelled all gloomy thoughts and memories.

It was quite a long walk, leading them past the picturesque old stone church with the quaint adjoining parsonage where Reverend Mr Muldaur was hoeing his flowerbeds, and further into the rural countryside, offering plenty to contemplate and to take delight in for all the senses.

The excursions of the last two days had provided John with a rough mental map of the area. He now understood that the idea of Reigate was an intrinsic dichotomy: On the one hand, there was the town of Reigate on whose outskirts the cottage of Colonel Hayter lay, equipped with all the necessities and hideosities of modern urban life: shops, cafés, restaurants, which overran the scarce reminders of the town's proud history like rampant weeds.

On the other hand, there were the country houses scattered loosely around the town, cleaving to Reigate's feudal past, a living memorial to English verdure, English culture, English comfort.

From what John could tell, the distance between Cunningham Estate and Milverton's house was greater than that between the estate and the town – and yet here was Paulina, considering Milverton a neighbour as naturally as she excluded the residents of the town from that particular title.

Involuntarily, John smirked.

It was amusing to think that despite the modern, hands-on approach to life which the inhabitants of the large country houses displayed in their everyday lives, not all traces of the Downton Abbey era had vanished from their consciousness. Obviously, the big local families still made up a set of their own, separate from the middle-class incomer population of the town, defining neighbourhood by high-born habit rather than proximity.

_Tradition, John. Our traditions define us._

Yes, it was easy to picture Mycroft in this setting, regally greeting a group of guests on his perfectly kept premises; whereas Sherlock, in a somewhat childish denial of his own feudal past, seemed to have little sympathy for the rural parts of Reigate.

As they passed a field on which a couple of cows grazed, a concert consisting of a few sluggish moos and the insistent buzzing of flies which circled around the ruminants drowned out birds and crickets, the consulting detective eyed the population and the enclosure of the meadow with suspicious loathing. His eyes quickly slivered up and down and from side to side.

John felt pretty certain that his aloof friend was calculating which animal would attack them with the greatest probability and if the pale would withstand the brute beast's force. Hastily, he bent sideways so Sherlock wouldn't detect the grin that he couldn't suppress.

The familiar ping of his phone roused Sherlock from his mute battle with the disinterestedly chewing brown foes.

Grinning, he held the screen up to John's face.

He'd received a picture message which read: _Thank you, guys – for the cake in my face! _and showed both Molly and Lestrade. The familiar features of Scotland Yard's handsome inspector were somewhat hidden under clots of cream and the occasional pink sugar star adorned his forehead and silver hair. However, both Molly and Lestrade were laughing heartily, their good understanding obviously re-established.

'I wasn't there,' Sherlock pouted. 'At last something interesting happened in London and I wasn't there to witness it.'

'You already had a corpse to play round with yesterday,' John commented drily, 'don't get greedy.'

As they descended further into the valley, they suddenly caught sight of Paulina Cunningham and Annie Morrison. The latter was sitting on the grass, lifting up her wide, shocked eyes to the woman who paced up and down in front of her.

A couple of steps later, fragments of Paulina's shouts reached their ears,

'…no respect…ruined my life…life I wanted…that odious old house…hate the house…fighting against the mess everyday…I'm not letting him…all I ever wanted was a nice little modern flat with no more than three rooms to clean and to keep tidy…It's enough, I won't go back…'

Upon hearing the last bit, Aloysius cried out as if in pain and ran to his aunt as fast as his little legs would carry him.

'Don't go! he cried. 'Don't go, Auntie!'

Reaching his aunt, he clung to her with all the terror of a little boy who'd already been abandoned by far too many people and now feared losing the last figure of importance in his life.

She swept him up in her arms, cradled him to her chest and kissed his head, all the fury, exasperation and disappointment over the one duty that had been cruelly forced on her dispelled from her face and voice by that other big duty which she had taken on voluntarily.

'Darling, don't cry, calm down, it's alright, everything's going to be fine,' she tried to soothe her nephew. 'It's nothing to do with you. I'm angry with your granddad. And I'm not sure if I want to see him again soon. I can't say that I won't go, but I'd never, never go without you.'

'Promise?' he asked anxiously.

'Promise,' she said readily and then playfully nudged his nose with her own. 'You silly boy, of course you're coming with me – what would I do without you?'

'And Sir Anthony?' he asked, just in case.

She laughed.

'Sir Anthony, too, of course.'

With greater sobriety, she continued, 'I'm not sure I want to go back there today. I'm still very angry, you see. Why don't we go and do something nice, you, me, and Sir Anthony? We could drive to Grayshott Pottery and watch them make dishware. And then we could have a nice piece of cake in their café. What do you say to that, darling?'

'We could try to find a new mug for Sir Anthony,' Aloysius suggested enthusiastically.

'As a replacement for the one he broke last week? Well why not?' his aunt agreed with an indulgent smile. 'Annie, can you go back to the house and make sure that everything's okay there? Someone needs to accept the consignment of bark mulch that we ordered for the rose beds. It's scheduled for four and I never trust those men to bring themselves to open the door.'

Annie nodded meekly.

Turning to the pair of detectives who had silently approached, Paulina asked jocosely, bouncing her nephew a little up and down in her arms, 'Can you spare him for the afternoon?'

'It'll be tough,' John said with a mock-solemn face, 'but we'll try to manage as best as we can.'

He was grateful that Sherlock refrained from correcting him.

A man down, they finally arrived at Milverton's house.

_-SHSHSH-_

John didn't know exactly what he'd expected, but the smooth, smug way in which the media mogul offered them coffee in his study certainly hadn't been it. Whatever had made him angry to the point of berserk last night clearly no longer bothered him in the sober light of day.

Instead, Milverton seemed delighted to be in the company of Sherlock once more and practically drowned him in a flow of pleasant conversation and suggestive smiles that made John want to vomit. The fact that his friend seemed to permit the overtures of the man who was one of their prime suspects in a murder inquisition, almost to the point of returning them, didn't ease his feeling of repulsion.

If it had been anyone else, John would have said they were flirting.

'Tell me more about those murders,' Milverton said, edging his chair closer to Sherlock's.

The consulting detective smirked.

'I'm here because I'm interested in what you've got to say about them.'

'Did I make it onto your list of suspects?' Milverton asked with a disgustingly hearty laugh. 'That's brilliant. If you give me leave to publish a series of articles on the process of your investigation, I'll give you a full confession at the end of it. I'm sure the readers would lap it up! Now that would be something worth going to prison for!'

Sherlock nodded, seemingly impressed.

'A novel way of committing and solving crime. _Interesting_.'

That word alone sent nauseous shivers down John's spine.

He tried to focus on something else and let his eyes wonder gratuitously over Milverton's furniture and curtains as though he'd suddenly discovered his arduous passion for interior design.

However, there was something in Sherlock's rich baritone which always commanded his attention. It was a voice whose mere whisper could have instantly woken John from the deepest sleep, a voice that reverberated with shared adventures and bode extraordinary things yet to come.

Soon he was forced to tune back into the odious conversation that he had no active part in.

'I'm sure I'm not underestimating you when I say that you know more of what's going on in this area than anyone else.'

Complacently, Milverton tilted his head.

'If you want to know people's dirty little secrets – I'm your man. We should pair up one day – then no morsel of information would be lost between us, haha!'

'Tell me more about the Cunninghams. Being family, however distant, makes me encumberingly blind.'

'Yes, it's better to be without family, isn't it?' Milverton agreed with a meaningful nod.

'Quite,' the consulting detective assented casually.

'Now – the Cunninghams. Let me see. Sooner or later, Ernest is going to bash in his father's head. No love lost there. They've been at odds all their lives.'

'Feels familiar,' Sherlock smirked and leaned forward a little. 'I'd give anything to have my brother out of my life for good.'

'I'm sure Ernest Cunningham feels the same about his father. He follows me around like a dog, trying to get me to publish his essays in The Avon Review. Desperate to impress his father.'

'Alex Cunningham seems to have a better relationship to his progenitor.'

'Yes, he always was the model child. And now he's striving for the model career and the model family, my arse. He's been having the hottest affair imaginable with Lady Eva Blackwell right up to his engagement day.'

John felt his jaw drop. For he knew Lady Blackwell. She'd consulted Sherlock when one of her immensely valuable bracelets had been missing. She'd been impressive, certainly, not devoid of sex appeal, either, or what passed for it at her age. But, God, she'd been in her fifties! Who'd have thought that she was a closet Mrs Erlynne!

'People like Alex are my daily bread,' Milverton's smug voice resonated through John's shocked mind which was still trying to rearrange itself around this startling piece of information on their former illustrious client. 'All that empty glamour to conceal personal shortcomings. Where there's light, there's shadow – or for me: money. Not that Alex realises it, the prig. He clings to me almost even more than his brother, wanting his name to be mentioned everywhere. He strives for fame, for public recognition, for universal popularity. Ha! He's got no idea that he's feeding me all his dirty little secrets along the way.'

Shifting closer still to Milverton, Sherlock remarked, 'Unless I'm very much mistaken, Lady Blackwell is the godmother of Henrietta Darlington and had every intention of passing Alex Cunningham on to her goddaughter. I suppose the Darlington family bears a grudge against Annie Morrison?'

'Understatement of the century. When Inessa McConnor was discovered dead, my first thought was that this was Lady Blackwell telling Annie Morrison "You'll be next, you little chippy."'

For the first time since he'd entered the house the words that left Milverton's foul mouth managed to strike a chord with John. Sherlock seemed convinced that the murderer was a secret service agent on a mission for Mycroft. But what if the murders were personal, after all?

Then a new thought struck him as he remembered the opera that Sherlock had taken him to, probably because operas had a knack for making things particularly obvious. What he'd liked about the plot was that throughout there'd been a political dimension to the family drama and vice versa. What if this applied to the case at hand too? What if the murderer was an MI5-man using his mission as a cover to exact personal vengeance?

Maybe similar thoughts had befallen his friend, for he asked, 'Do you think that Annie Morrison is aware of all that?'

A cruel laugh escaped Milverton's mouth.

'I don't know where they breed girls like stupid little Annie, so ready to believe that the world is a shiny glass ball for them to play with. I tried to give her a hint, but she really believes that she's part of the greatest love story of the 21st century, her dear darling Alex a shining knight of goodness and honesty. Try telling her that he only selected her for the perfect home story pictures in magazines to help him on his way to 11 Downing Street. She wouldn't believe you.'

Sherlock laughed along, the rich shades of his baritone voice coloured in amusement and admiration, and he placed a hand on Milverton's shoulder.

'Have you tried?'

John really, really wished that he could have just ignored that magnificent voice and lost himself in thoughts on Alex Cunningham and Lady Blackwell. Alas, it was impossible.

Milverton cackled smugly, a sound that made John's stomach rumble most unpleasantly. Sherlock's departure to the loo saved him from giving in to the impulse to puke, for as soon as the consulting detective was gone, their host's merry, bragging behaviour vanished like a lamp that had been switched off.

Coolly, he exchanged a couple of syllables with John, clearly not caring for a word he had to say, as though the doctor were nothing more than Sherlock's clothes rack.

A couple of minutes elapsed in silence, before Milverton began to grow impatient that Sherlock was taking his time and walked out of the study in search of him.

John knew his friend well enough to realise that Sherlock had a tendency to be in places where he had no right to be, so he followed, lest their host would take offence at the detective's possible snooping.

Luckily, John's concerns were completely unwarranted. Sherlock was standing in the corridor leading up to Milverton's study, gazing intently at a painting of modern art that hung on the wall.

John couldn't see anything special in it. But then, he wasn't much into art at all, and contemporary art in particular was a closed book to him. He would never be able to understand why grown adults spent so much time gushing over pictures that looked as though a four-year-old had scrawled them during his lunch break.

Sherlock on the other hand was brimming with admiration for the piece.

'Amazing,' he murmured. Turning to Milverton, he added, 'I contemplated this for hours at the exhibition at the Tate eight years back. Then I thought that I'd memorised it perfectly, but there's such an endless variety of form and colour that it's taken me quite by surprise on seeing it again now.'

'I bought it back then,' Milverton announced with a cockish grin. 'A beauty, isn't it?'

'What do you think of those arabesques on the right side, quite Raphaelite, wouldn't you say?' Sherlock purred in a low and seductive voice.

He stepped gracefully behind their host and pointed his arm over the other man's shoulder to show him what he was talking about.

John saw nothing that he would vaguely have described as arabesque, let alone Raphaelite. What he saw with startling clarity, however, was his friend's slim front pressed tightly against Milverton's back, his outstretched arm hovering in front of the pair of them. It was an intimate gesture, one that John had seen in plenty of movies, shared between a stargazing couple in love, usually a man and a woman.

Suddenly, the corridor felt far too hot and stuffy. He was infinitely glad when Sherlock began saying their goodbyes a moment later.

'How long will you be staying?' Milverton wanted to know. 'I'm going to London tonight and I don't know when I'll be back…'

He paused effectively.

'I'm afraid I'll be stuck here for quite a while,' Sherlock drawled with a comically sad face. 'My doctor is quite intent on keeping me locked up in the country side.'

The prospect of having to endure Milverton's company yet again – added to the general observation that Sherlock's health seemed perfectly restored – almost made John call off their stay in the country right there and then, but he kept his tongue in check.

_-SHSHSH-_

Once they were safely back outside in the fresh country air, surrounded by the familiar and soothing noises and lights of a warm afternoon in early summer, John took several deep breaths. Slowly, the coiling surges of nausea receded.

From where he was walking next to him, Sherlock cast him a curious slanted look.

'Are you alright, John?' he asked carefully.

'Am I – what, Sherlock?' John exploded. 'What was that? Why did I have to come along? Can't you just tell me next time "I'm off on a quick flirt" and leave me be?'

A slightly hurt expression appeared on Sherlock's face.

'I thought you were saying this morning that you wanted me to include you more.'

'Yes,' John explained in exasperation, 'when it's for a case.'

'But –' Sherlock began with a puzzled look, before the full meaning of John's words dawned on him. Then his face suddenly shone with wry amusement. 'Really, John, did you think we were _flirting_? You need to pay more attention. You were the only one whose thoughts strayed to baser matters. Milverton and I were all business.'

John stared at him.

'Business of what kind? You didn't even ask for his alibi.'

'He believes that I'm currently in possession of the material that he's threatening the government with. I… _encouraged _that notion and allowed him to hope that I would give it back to him if he did me the favour of getting Mycroft off my back.'

'Are you joking? When did that happen? I was there!'

'Well, your mind was clearly engaged elsewhere,' Sherlock smirked.

'So he's not – And how did you know that Milverton was blackmailing the government?'

'Really, John, that was obvious almost from the start. Milverton's been eyeing me very carefully since we first arrived. No doubt he thought that my brother sent me to retrieve the information that he's using for blackmail. What he doesn't know is that Mycroft sent someone else, a secret service agent, to do the dirty work.'

'What are you saying?' John wondered, trying to process all that was being said and to fit it into what they'd already discovered so far. 'Milverton blackmails the government. Check. Mycroft sends someone to put a stop to it. Check. But why would that person look for Milverton's blackmail material in Mr Acton's house and the Cunninghams'?'

'You're finally starting to ask the right questions,' Sherlock said with a pleased smile. John poked him playfully.

'You've seen Milverton's study, John. No safe, no extensive data storage devices, nothing which indicates that he keeps any valuable information there. As I told you, his house has been searched several times and nothing ever turned up. Then where is he keeping his treasures?'

'Are you saying he's hiding his things at other people's houses? But that's really stupid.'

'Not as elegant as the methods that I would have come up with,' Sherlock agreed smugly, 'but probably the best solution that presented itself to what was left of his funny little brain after extensive exposure to ultraviolet radiation. There's a risk of the information being discovered or getting lost, yes, but it's infinitely smaller than if he were keeping the data at his own place. I'd expect that all kinds of desperate individuals try to break into his house every other week, trying to retrieve the petty little secrets that he's holding above their heads. He's made a job of ruining thousands and thousands of lives, after all.'

'Okay, so he thinks it's safer to leave his things lying around at his unsuspecting neighbours'. Well, he frequently visits them all, that's for sure. So he can just leave things there and then he can drop by to check that they're still there or to take them away again with very little effort. I get that. But really – if someone cluttered my place… okay, well maybe our flat is a bad example, but a cleaner place – if I found strange memory sticks lying around on my desk, that would make me suspicious, right?'

'You forget what Milverton's online purchases told us yesterday, John.'

'They didn't really tell me anything,' John protested. 'You just looked at them with that infuriatingly knowing look you do so well and wouldn't really tell me what it was all about.'

'Milverton ordered individually tailored memory sticks or other data storage devices that wouldn't give away what they were to the casual onlooker. Think for instance of Paulina's decorations in the breakfast room that we sat in this morning. If one of those pyramid-shaped candles had a secret USB-plug at the bottom, no one would notice. And when you think of the size of the house, you can come up with hundreds of similar examples.'

'With Mr Acton it would be somewhat trickier,' John mused. 'His rooms were almost bare.'

Sherlock nodded thoughtfully.

After walking a couple of minutes in companionable silence, where John carefully mulled over all that had been said, he began again with growing excitement, 'If Milverton thinks that you've taken whatever he's threatened the government with, then that means that the murderer must have been successful – he found the hidden memory stick or whatever it was. Yesterday, Milverton noticed that it was gone – that's why he was so angry, right. Right.'

'Good, John.'

'And you knew all that before our meeting with him this afternoon?' John asked with animated admiration in his voice.

'Not all,' Sherlock admitted modestly. 'I could only be certain once I was inside his house.'

'Why then?'

'Because of the smoking.'

'What do you mean?'

'The house was as non-smoking as they get, no ashtrays, no half-open cigarette packages lying around, nothing on the tables near the front or back door, so he isn't smoking outside, either. I checked. I even peaked inside his bin – no cigarette stubs, nothing.'

'So he only smoked at Mr Acton's to get a chance to rummage through his drawers?' John asked. He chortled. 'And then he saw that whatever he was looking for was gone… too bad. He probably half-choked on his cigarette when he noticed. Ha. Serves him right.'

Sherlock chuckled along.

Slowly, they mounted the sloping meadows that they'd descended from on their way to Milverton's house and eventually, the blurred outlines of the town came back into view. As they approached Hayter's cottage, John asked, 'So what happens now?'

'I suggest that we have an early dinner at one of the restaurants on High Street and then we'll prepare for our night of daring adventure!'

'Our _what_?' John repeated.

His eyes flashing in an excited way that never bode much good, Sherlock announced as if it were the most obvious thing in the world, 'Why, we're going to break into Milverton's house, of course.'

John had no idea as to why this was a matter of course, but his heart and pulse started throbbing with anticipation and he could feel himself looking forward to the events of the night.

_-SHSHSH-_

When John happily gobbled down a dish of Chicken Lo Mein his friend filled him in on how they would accomplish the night's big feat.

Apparently, all that touching which John could only remember with disgust hadn't been entirely accidental. Distracting Milverton with a flirtatious hand on his shoulder, Sherlock had pinched the man's diary.

Soon afterwards, when he'd excused himself to the loo, he'd not only snooped around the house, but he'd also taken pictures of all the entries he deemed important. Later, leaning over Milverton, pretending to gush over the Raphaelite arabesques in that strange piece of modern art, he'd slipped the diary back into his pocket.

Grinning triumphantly, the consulting detective now brandished his phone. From what John could make out across the table, Sherlock had photographed entries of Milverton's address book. That didn't make sense.

'What's that?' he mumbled over a mouthful of Lo Mein.

Sherlock sent him a scathing look at his bad table manners which John felt was entirely unwarranted. It wasn't as if his flatmate never spoke with his mouth full either.

His brows still fluttering reprimandingly all over the place, the consulting detective prompted, 'What do you see, John?'

John carefully took the phone and browsed through the photos, which contained the following information:

_Cynthia Claire Milverton_

_20 Westmoreland Street, Glasgow, G42 7QP_

_Phone: 0141/43214541_

_0ffice: 0141/72329734_

_Mobile: 0144/3362-791_

_o0o_

_Berenice Adriana Milverton_

_105 Ack Lane West, Cheadle Hulme, Cheadle, Cheshire, SK8 7EU_

_Phone: 0161/2346672_

_Office: 0161/95213-5453_

_o0o_

_Frederick Daniel Milverton_

_31 Redhill Street, London, NW1 4DQ_

_Phone: 020/34517651_

_o0o_

_Benedict Darius Milverton_

_49 Linden Grove, London, SE15 3LF_

_Phone: 020/99218835_

_o0o_

_Percy Cyril Milverton_

_5 Ovington Terrace, Canton, Cardiff CF5_

_Phone: 029/9325678219_

He looked up again with a nonplussed expression on his face.

'What does this tell us apart from the fact that Milverton has a couple of relatives whose names seem like something straight out of Harry Potter?'

'Didn't you listen when he talked about family this afternoon? He doesn't have any family to speak of. In fact, if you'd ever perused a copy of The Baronetage, you'd know that Sir Charles Augustus is the last one left of the noble stock of Milverton.'

'Of course, that's just my kind of bedtime reading,' John rejoined sarcastically. Then he looked back down on his plate and exclaimed, 'Hey, what happened to all my noodles?'

Sherlock smiled innocently at him.

'I'll never understand why you don't just order a dish for yourself,' John said, shaking his head.

'If I get the Lo Mein, I can't have my dim sum,' Sherlock complained.

'It would hurt neither your purse nor your waistline to simply order both.'

'But it tastes so much better when it's from your plate, John.'

John rolled his eyes and dropped the subject in favour of returning to Milverton's non-existent relatives.

'It's very simple, John,' Sherlock explained superciliously. 'Average minds can't memorise all their passwords and codes. Especially when they go for random numbers in the hope that it's safer. Everybody lives in the constant fear of some big, bad guy stealing his credit card and finding out his pin code while at the same time being too stupid to remember it. This leads to the strange solution that people jot down their most important passcodes on something they keep close to their person and often they try to disguise them. You should know, you underline birthdays that you use as passwords in your pocket book.'

'Shh!' John interrupted him and anxiously looked around to see if anyone at the tables around theirs had been listening. 'That's not the kind of information you announce in public, Sherlock.'

'You wanted to know!' Sherlock pouted.

'I wanted you to tell me about Milverton's secret diary entries, not my own,' John persisted.

'Fine,' Sherlock said with a histrionic little sigh. 'Like you, Milverton used his diary to retain all his important personal details and tried to disguise them as addresses. If you check, you'll see that all the addresses are actually buildings that Milverton inhabited at one time or the other. As for the phone numbers, you'll find that none of them actually exist. Milverton wasn't terribly ingenious, so he made it very easy to decode.

'Every fake relative is listed with two first names, in itself an unusual occurrence. With a little guessing, you'll find that the initials of the two first names are abbreviations in order to allocate the passcodes to their field of application. BA is short for bank account, CC stands for credit card, FD gives us the security code for the front door, BD the matching code for the back door and PC the code to open his computer.'

'Wait, I'm trying to understand this. So, the first one. The one with the three phone numbers. You say it's the credit card.'

'A credit card consists of sixteen digits. Scratch out the area code of the first two numbers – that yields the sixteen digit number.'

'And the third one?'

'Did you notice the hyphen between the first three digits after the area code and the last four? Such a tell-tale sign! It separates the pin code and the card security code. Easy.'

John shook his head, his features half baffled, half fond.

'Didn't seem that easy to me.'

'Well, I've frequently seen that sort of thing in the past. This fake phone number strategy is a great favourite with overcautious, little old ladies,' Sherlock informed him contemptuously.

John wondered if he should warn Mrs Hudson to update her personal diary. Turning back to the addresses, he said, 'If I got it right, there's an eight-digit code both for the front and the back door.'

'Right,' Sherlock nodded.

'So we just enter that and then walk into his house?'

'Right,' Sherlock said again. When John showed no reaction, he added, 'If that's not enough fun for you, we could always try climbing in through the windows.'

John laughed.

'No, no, that's fine. That's – better than fine.'

Handing the phone back to his friend, he asked, 'So what's the plan of action? Milverton will be away in London. Could anybody else still be there?'

'No. Milverton lives on his own. No servants, no neighbours near enough to have a clear view of his house. Perfect for a spot of burglary. As long as we don't trigger the alarm, we should be fine.'

'So we'll wait until it's dark before we enter the house and then – what are we actually looking for?'

'Anything that gives us a clue as to what kind of information our murderer was after, what it looked like and where it was hidden.'

'And you think that Milverton will have that lying around for us.'

'Of course,' Sherlock said with a self-assured smirk. 'The good thing about you ordinary people is that you can't retain all necessary information in your tiny little brains. You always leave traces, no matter how clever you're trying to be.'

'Thanks,' John commented drily and batted away his friend's fork which had once again come suspiciously close to his own plate.

_-SHSHSH-_

Everything went with dream-like ease. After pretending to go to bed they sneaked out of Colonel Hayter's cottage, undeterred. On their walk across the fields they encountered neither man nor beast, for which John was extraordinarily grateful, as he somehow doubted that Sherlock would be able to keep gliding silently along were he to come face to face with a cow.

As Sherlock had predicted, all they needed to do was type in the security code at the front door and as simple as that they were inside.

The consulting detective immediately started the computer in Milverton's study while John walked around, trying to spot other things that might be of interest.

His mind wandered to the owner of the house in which they were sniffing about. Right now Milverton was probably in London, in vain trying to discover a dirty tale or other on Mycroft Holmes. John felt almost sorry for him.

He was convinced that the discovery that the elder Holmes brother occupied an important position in the British government would remain the only piece of privileged information that the media mogul could lay his hands on.

From his own experience, he knew that when Mycroft didn't want to be disturbed, his smart assistants and sleek, black cars magically disappeared off the face of the earth, as though they'd never been there in the first place. Probably the Holmes ancestral home was a second Hogwarts, too, the untraceable, unplottable seat of mystery and intrigue.

Lacking the means and the methods of Mycroft Holmes, Milverton had established his own modest attempts at untraceability. As it turned out, there was very little personal data on his harddrive. For good measure Sherlock copied all the files on to the external harddrive that he'd brought along, as well as all of Milverton's mail account and his browser history.

At random he opened files and perused them there and then, muttering to himself, though he never spouted off the decisive 'Ah!' that would have informed John that he'd discovered something of real importance to their case.

'He seems to be quite the movie fan,' John remarked conversationally, noticing the DVD-shelf in the corner of the room. Scanning the DVD collection quickly from top to bottom, he added, 'Lots of Travolta…. Only Travolta… Bloody hell,' he cursed, when his eyes fell on the black-and-white snapshot of the roughly twenty-year-younger Milverton which was placed on the shelf at a narcissistic angle, 'he looks like young Travolta, too.'

Sherlock looked up from whatever he was doing at the computer.

'John,' he asked, 'do any of the movies look as though they were purchased within the last two weeks?'

'No, they all look well-used to me. Why?'

'One of the few personal files on the harddrive is a list of DVDs – it was last changed a fortnight ago. Interesting. What did you just say about Travolta-something?'

'Travolta is an actor. Milverton only buys his movies. Clear case of narcissism, if you ask me. Not that I'm surprised.'

'Come here a moment, John, and see if you notice anything unusual. This is your field of expertise, after all.'

The screen light tinted Sherlock into hues of blue and white, illuminating him like a pale ghost that John had summoned to cheer up his dull existence, though unlike the traditional spectre of folklore, he was making demands rather than fulfilling them.

John complied and gazed at the computer screen over his friend's shoulder where he beheld the following list:

_A Civil Action_

_A Love Song for Bobby Long_

_Basic_

_Battlefield Earth_

_Be Cool_

_Blow Out_

_Carrie_

_Changing Times_

_Chains of Gold_

_Currency_

_Dash Cunning_

_Desk Set_

_Domestic Disturbance_

_Edie & Pen_

_Face/Off_

_From Paris with Love_

_Get Shorty_

_Grease_

_Hairspray_

_Junket Whore_

_Lonely Hearts_

_Look Who's Talking_

_Look Who's Talking Now_

_Look Who's Talking Too_

_Lucky Numbers_

_Man with the Movie Camera_

_Michael_

_Moment by Moment_

_Naked Lunch_

_No Country for Old Men_

_Off the Menu: The Last Days of Chasen's_

_Old Dogs_

_Perfect_

_Primary Colors_

_Pulp Fiction_

_Saturday Night Fever_

_She's So Lovely_

_Shout_

_Silent Hill_

_Staying Alive_

_Swordfish_

_Table No. 21_

_The Birds_

_The Boy in the Plastic Bubble_

_The Devil's Rain_

_The Elephant in the Living Room_

_The General's Daughter_

_The Thin Red Line_

_Two of a Kind_

_Urban Cowboy_

_Welcome to Hollywood_

_White Man's Burden_

_Wild Hogs_

Quickly looking the titles up and down, he was about to shake his head and point out – when he suddenly heard it: There were footsteps on the stairs. Faint footsteps, but footsteps all the same.

They were caught.

Sherlock, his usually so agile friend, failed to react to the approaching danger. Lost in the depths of his mind, he merely looked up from the screen in surprise, slowly, lingering like a translucent spirit with no sense of place or time, leaving all worldly concerns to John's military experience and pragmatism.

There was no time to shut down the computer, no time to eliminate all traces of their presence. Hastily, John switched off the light and the monitor and pulled his careless friend behind the safety of a curtain.

Not a moment later, the intruder entered the study.

John held his breath. His heart pounded in his chest. He could hear the faint footsteps of their approaching adversary. Then they stopped, almost indecisively.

All at once, the silence was broken by an all too familiar ping, announcing an incoming text message and John's heart missed a beat in shock. Like a perverted kind of echo, infinitely louder than the original, the text alert noise was followed instantaneously by the crude cacophony of a shot being fired and of bursting glass and of John's thundering heart.

_Uiuiuiui _the shrill alarm went off outside. _Uiuiuiui_.

Then John felt Sherlock slide to the ground next to him and his heart stopped.


End file.
